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Dictynna Revue de poétique latine

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Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/dictynna/1797 DOI : 10.4000/dictynna.1797 ISSN : 1765-3142

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SOMMAIRE

‘Most musicall, most melancholy’: Avian aesthetics of lament in Greek and Roman elegy Thomas J. Nelson

From Cumae to the Po: Italian Itineraries in Aeneid 6 Micah Y. Myers

Nescioquid maius: Gender, Genre, and the Repetitions of Ovid’s Medea Barbara W. Boyd

The Shade of Orpheus : Ambiguity and the Poetics of Vmbra in Metamorphoses 10 Celia Campbell

En attendant Achille (Stace, Achilléide, I, 467-513) : enjeux dramatiques, éthiques et politiques d’une scène « de transition » François Ripoll

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‘Most musicall, most melancholy’: Avian aesthetics of lament in Greek and Roman elegy1

Thomas J. Nelson

1 In Il Penseroso (‘The Reflective Man’), the English poet John Milton (1608–1674) conjures a vision of poetic melancholy and contemplation. After invoking the Goddess Melancholy and picturing her attendant train (‘Peace’, ‘Quiet’ and the like), he dwells on a night-time scene of melancholic music (vv. 55–64): And the mute Silence hist along, ’Less Philomel will deign a Song, In her sweetest, saddest plight, Smoothing the rugged brow of night, While Cynthia checks her Dragon yoke, Gently o’re th’ accustom’d Oke; Sweet Bird that shunn’st the noise of folly, Most musicall, most melancholy! Thee Chauntress oft the Woods among, I woo to hear thy Eeven-Song;

2 In Milton’s thought world, reflective silence is banished by the intrusive song of the nightingale (‘Philomel’), whose melody comes alive through the incessant sibilance and alliteration of these verses. The bird is a figure of song and sweetness: she is ‘sweet’ (61), ‘most musicall’ (62), and a ‘chauntress’ (63) in the ‘sweetest’ of situations (57). Yet she is also a figure of loss and lamentation, suffering her ‘saddest plight’ (57) and proving ‘most melancholy’ (62). Milton juxtaposes these two states directly in an oxymoronic combination of pleasure and anguish: she is both ‘most musicall’ and ‘most melancholy’ (62), her plight is both ‘sweetest’ and ‘saddest’ (57). Through this vivid vignette, the bird becomes an emblem of Milton’s poetic melancholia: she ‘shun[s] the noise of folly’ (61) just as the poet began his ode by dismissing ‘vain deluding joyes, | The brood of folly’ (1–2). This underlying sense of opposition even extends to the relationship of Il Pensero with its companion piece, L’Allegro (‘The Lively Man’), a contrasting celebration of poetic mirth.2 Whereas that poem features a rooster crowing

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a ‘Matin’ cry (L’Allegro 114), the nightingale here sings an ‘Eeven-Song’ (64). Her sweet and sombre notes mark the end of the day, a time associated with darkness, death and closure. The bird embodies the melancholic mood of Milton’s ode.

3 I have begun with this passage because it epitomises many of the themes and associations that I wish to explore in this paper: birds as a symbol of poetry; the aesthetic qualities of their song; and the interplay of the sweet and the sombre in the generic self-consciousness of a particular genre of ancient poetry, elegy. We shall see that Milton’s self-reflexive depiction of the nightingale has a considerable pre-history in the Classical world. My focus will be two birds that were particularly associated with lament and elegy in antiquity: the nightingale and the swan. I shall begin by setting the scene with important background for this study, tracing the association of elegy and lament in ancient theoretical reflections on the genre (Section I), and the well- established classical tradition of employing birds as metapoetic emblems (Section II). I shall then explore occasions in Hellenistic and Roman poetry where the nightingale (Section III) and the swan (Section IV) emerge as symbols of elegy both within and beyond the elegiac corpus. And I shall close by considering the larger significance of these metaliterary gestures for our understanding of ancient elegy (Section V). The legends associated with both birds rendered them natural models of lamentation, but beyond this thematic connection I shall argue that the very sound and nature of their song rendered them perfect emblems of the genre.

I. Elegy and Lament

4 When we think of elegy – and especially of Roman elegy – it is natural to think first of love and of the amatory poetry of elegists such as Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid and Sulpicia.3 The trials and tribulations of love, however, were only ever one facet of elegy’s generic disposition. In archaic and classical Greece, elegiac poetry exhibited a wide range of subject matter, concerns and interests, including the martial exhortation of Tyrtaeus, the mournful musings of Mimnermus, and Archilochus’ reflections on wine, seafaring and warfare. There was little sense at the start that love would one day be the genre’s overriding concern.4

5 By the time we reach Rome, however, we do find a clearer conception of the essence and origins of elegy, thanks in no small part to the literary codifications and generic classifications of Hellenistic scholars. Yet even then, the origins of the genre were located not in the realm of love, but in the sphere of lament and mourning. The very word itself, ἐλεγεία, was etymologically derived from various Greek words: the noun ἔλεος (‘pity’), the expression of lament ἒ ἒ λέγειν (‘to say ah ah’) or the similar εὖ λέγειν (‘to speak well’), reflecting a key feature of θρῆνος, the praise of the deceased.5 Throughout their works, Roman poets and critics repeatedly allude to this generic aetion, associating elegy with mournful lament. In the Ars Poetica, Horace famously remarks that slender elegies (exiguos elegos, Ars P. 77) started off as the genre of querimonia, before being expanded to incorporate votive dedications (Ars P. 75–78): versibus impariter iunctis querimonia primum, post etiam inclusa est voti sententia compos; quis tamen exiguos elegos emiserit auctor, grammatici certant et adhuc sub iudice lis est.

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Lament was first framed in verses unequally joined, and afterwards so too was the sentiment of granted prayer. As to which author first published slender elegies, the critics are in dispute and the controversy still waits the determination of a judge.

6 The subject of love in the Ars Poetica, by contrast, is relegated to the realm of lyric ten lines later, alongside hymns, epinicia and drinking-songs (iuvenum curas, AP 85). In Horace’s characterisation of elegy, love has been completely effaced by the presence of lament.6

7 Horace was not alone in this conception of the genre’s origins. The very language that Roman poets use of elegy also reflects this aetiological background: the genre is repeatedly described as flebilis, ‘tearful’, and miserabilis, ‘pitiable’.7 The Alexandrian scholar Didymus, an older contemporary of Horace, went even further than his peers in connecting the very metrical form of elegy to these lamentatory origins. The shorter pentameter falls away, he claims, just like the fate of the dead (Didym. Περὶ ποιητῶν [p. 387 Schmidt], apud Orion. gramm. etym. s.v. ἔλεγος [p. 58 Sturz]): πεντάμετρον τῷ ἡρωϊκῷ συνῆπτον, οὐχ ὁμοδραμοῦντα τῇ τοῦ προτέρου δυνάμει, ἀλλ’ οἷον συνεκπνέοντα καὶ συσβεννύμενον ταῖς τοῦ τελευτήσαντος τύχαις.

They joined the pentameter to the hexameter; the former cannot keep pace with the power of the first line, but seems to expire and be extinguished together with the fortunes of the deceased.8

8 In Didymus’ conception, elegy’s form reflects its inherent association with the world of lament. Notably, no ancient critic appears to have used the same image for other metrical schemes, even for those which involve comparable diminuendos or adaptations of the hexameter. The Sapphic stanza (which ‘falls away’ with the adonius of its final line) was associated with brevity and contraction, while the Sotadean (which reorders the long and short syllables of the hexameter) was considered effeminate, as if the masculine hexameter had metamorphosed into female form.9 But such reductions or alterations were never presented in funereal terms. Didymus’ morbid description of the elegiac couplet, by contrast, draws upon and reinforces elegy’s link with mourning.

9 In Augustan Rome, then, elegy was intimately associated with lament. Yet there is some reason to suspect that this association already existed far earlier in the Greek world. We find hints of it in Hellenistic, Classical and even Archaic texts, although never yet so explicitly theorised. Ewen Bowie has noted that the earliest attestations of ἔλεγος (‘lament’ – from which ἐλεγεῖον and ἐλεγεία seem to be derived) appear in a cluster of Euripidean plays in the seven or eight years after 415 BCE (e.g. Hecuba’s ‘elegoi of tears’, δακρύων ἐλέγους, Tro. 119) and has suggested that one of Euripides’ contemporaries with an interest in etymology and the history of music may have invented the etymological derivation then.10 But the lyricist Simonides’ association with elegy, threnody and (funereal) epigram may suggest that the connection goes back even further.11 Indeed, the growing prominence of elegiac couplets in sepulchral epitaphs during the sixth century would have established a natural connection between the metre and mourning.12 And already in some of Archilochus’ elegies, we find a prominent place given to the topic of lament: in fr. 13 W2, the poet reflects on the nature and limits of grief (κήδεα … στονόεντα, ἀναστένομεν, πένθος), while in other fragments he laments the death of his brother-in-law at sea.13 Already in the archaic age, elegy and lament were closely aligned.

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10 Even more suggestive, however, is the subject matter of several Hellenistic elegies which treat mythical tales of grief and suffering, again implying a close connection between elegy and lament: Eratosthenes’ Erigone concerns the suicide of the eponymous Attic girl, while Philitas’ Demeter dwells on the grieving goddess’ search for her stolen daughter. In the latter poem, our extant fragments are replete with the language of grief and sorrow. Within a handful of verses, we find no fewer than seven words associated with mourning: ἄλγεα, κήδεα, κλαυθμός, μέλεος, οἴμοι, πένθος and πῆμα (frr. 9–10, 12–13 Spanoudakis, frr. 1–4 Lightfoot). Although fragments are notoriously slippery to pin down, this lexical accumulation certainly suggests an association between elegy and lament in the Hellenistic age.14

11 In any case, given this (perceived) lamentatory background of elegy, it is easy to see how Roman love elegy slots into this generic archaeology. Love elegists tendentiously and often humorously appropriated the genre’s association with mourning, translating the emotional depths of funereal grief into the temporary heartbreak of the elegiac world: in their poems, they bathetically suffer symptoms of passion akin to death, express bereavement at the loss of their beloved, and depict themselves as locked-out lovers who bewail their pitiful fate. Suffering lovers too participate in the world of lament, and it is no surprise that the noun querela – a synonym of Horace’s querimonia – became a recurring buzzword of the genre.15 We might also compare Domitius Marsus’ epigram on the death of Tibullus, which neatly defines elegy as the lamenting of ‘soft loves’ (fr. 7 Courtney): te quoque Vergilio comitem non aequa, Tibulle, mors iuvenem campos misit ad Elysios, ne foret aut elegis molles qui fleret amores aut caneret forti regia bella pede.

You too, Tibullus, unfair death sent as Virgil’s comrade to the Elysian Fields while still a young man, so that nobody would live to weep soft loves in elegiacs, or to sing of royal wars with a strong foot.

12 Here too, however, we may suspect a Hellenistic background, given Hermesianax’s formulation of the elegist Antimachus as a grieving lover who fills his books with tears (fr. 7.41–46 Powell = fr. 3.41–46 Lightfoot): Λύδης δ᾿ Ἀντίμαχος Λυδηΐδος ἐκ μὲν ἔρωτος πληγεὶς Πακτωλοῦ ῥεῦμ᾿ ἐπέβη ποταμοῦ· †δαρδάνη δὲ θανοῦσαν ὑπὸ ξηρὴν θέτο γαῖαν κλαίων, †αἰζαον δ᾿ ἦλθεν ἀποπρολιπὼν ἄκρην ἐς Κολοφῶνα· γόων δ᾿ ἐνεπλήσατο βίβλους ἱράς, ἐκ παντὸς παυσάμενος καμάτου.

And Antimachus, struck by his love for Lydian Lyde, trod beside the stream of the Pactolus river; … but when she died, he laid her beneath the dry earth, weeping; and … after departing, he came to the citadel of Colophon and filled holy books with tears when he had ceased from all his distress.

13 The perceived origins of elegy in lament, then, were not incompatible with Augustan or earlier poets’ focus on the woes and sufferings of love. By contrast, the confrontation of love and lament, of amor and mors, proved a fertile matrix for the production of Roman elegy: the genre constantly mediated between the erotic and the sepulchral.16 In talking of Latin or Hellenistic ‘love elegy’, however, we should be careful not to forget the

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contours of this generic archaeology. When ancient poets thought of elegy, they thought of lament as much as love: lament was woven into the very fabric of the genre.

14 In this paper, I wish to consider how Greek and Roman authors both alluded to and reflected on this lamentatory background of elegy. Much scholarship in recent decades has explored elegy’s elaborate self-consciousness (especially in Rome), highlighting how it plays knowingly with its metrical form, Callimachean heritage and complicated relationship to hexameter epic.17 Building on this work, I aim to highlight a further strand of elegy’s generic self-fashioning, demonstrating the extent to which elegists appropriated both the swan and the nightingale as figures for elegiac lament. Several of these metaliterary moments have been discussed before, but a fuller collection of the material and a closer focus on the aesthetics of avian lament will further enrich our understanding of ancient elegy and its generic self-positioning.

15 Before turning to each bird in turn, however, I shall first lay out the precedent for avian metapoetics in archaic and classical Greek poetry – an essential background against which we can best appreciate the elegists’ innovative appropriation of tradition.

II. Birds of Song

16 By the Hellenistic and Roman periods, birds had long served as a symbol for poetic activity, part of a larger metapoetic bestiary which also included fish, insects and mammals. From our earliest literary texts, birds of various kinds are closely associated with both poetry and song – and none more so than the nightingale and the swan.18 Already in Homer, Penelope is compared to the nightingale, which is explicitly described as ‘singing’ a lovely cry – the only explicit mention of bird song in the whole of Homer (Od. 19.518–24):19 ὡς δ᾽ ὅτε Πανδαρέου κούρη, χλωρηῒς ἀηδών, καλὸν ἀείδῃσιν ἔαρος νέον ἱσταμένοιο, δενδρέων ἐν πετάλοισι καθεζομένη πυκινοῖσιν, ἥ τε θαμὰ τρωπῶσα χέει πολυηχέα φωνήν, παῖδ᾽ ὀλοφυρομένη Ἴτυλον φίλον, ὅν ποτε χαλκῷ κτεῖνε δι᾽ ἀφραδίας, κοῦρον Ζήθοιο ἄνακτος, ὣς καὶ ἐμοὶ δίχα θυμὸς ὀρώρεται ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα,

As when the daughter of Pandareus, the nightingale of the greenwood, sings her lovely song when spring has just begun, sitting amid the thick leaves of the trees, and pours out her many-toned voice, often changing its notes, lamenting her dear son Itylus, the son of lord Zethus, whom she once killed mistakenly with a sword; even so my own heart is stirred to and fro in doubt. 17 As scholars have long noted, the close juxtaposition here of ἀηδών (‘nightingale’) and ἀείδῃσιν (‘sings’) already hints at an etymological connection between the nightingale and song, a derivation that enjoyed a considerable afterlife in later Greek thought.20 Gregory Nagy, meanwhile, has seen in the description of the bird’s πολυηχέα (‘many- toned’) voice a model for Homer’s own art of variation.21 Already in the Odyssey, there is an implicit association between bard and bird; the nightingale’s song emblematises Homer’s poetic art.

18 This association becomes even more explicit in Hesiod’s Works and Days, in the famous fable of the hawk and the nightingale (Op. 203–12):

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ὧδ᾿ ἴρηξ προσέειπεν ἀηδόνα ποικιλόδειρον, ὕψι μάλ᾿ ἐν νεφέεσσι φέρων, ὀνύχεσσι μεμαρπώς· ἡ δ᾿ ἐλεόν, γναμπτοῖσι πεπαρμένη ἀμφ᾿ ὀνύχεσσι, μύρετο· τὴν ὅ γ᾿ ἐπικρατέως πρὸς μῦθον ἔειπεν· “δαιμονίη, τί λέληκας; ἔχει νύ σε πολλὸν ἀρείων· τῇ δ᾿ εἶς ᾗ σ᾿ ἂν ἐγώ περ ἄγω καὶ ἀοιδὸν ἐοῦσαν· δεῖπνον δ᾿, αἴ κ᾿ ἐθέλω, ποιήσομαι ἠὲ μεθήσω. ἄφρων δ᾿, Sὅς κ᾿ἐθέλῃ πρὸς κρείσσονας ἀντιφερίζειν· νίκης τε στέρεται πρός τ᾿ αἴσχεσιν ἄλγεα πάσχει.” ὣς ἔφατ᾿ ὠκυπέτης ἴρηξ, τανυσίπτερος ὄρνις.

So the hawk addressed the dapple-necked nightingale while he carried her very high up among the clouds, grasped in his talons. She wept pitifully, pierced by his curved talons; but he spoke forcefully to her: “Wretch, why are you screeching? You’re in the grip of someone far superior to you, and you’re going wherever I take you, singer though you may be. I’ll make you my dinner if I wish, or I’ll let you go. Foolish is he who wishes to contend with those who are stronger; for he is deprived of victory and suffers pains in addition to disgrace.” So spoke the swift-flying hawk, the long-winged bird.

19 It has often been remarked that this passage rewrites the hawk’s usual Homeric diet of doves, jackdaws and starlings, so as to introduce the nightingale as a specifically poetic model.22 The hawk explicitly calls the nightingale a ‘singer’ (ἀοιδόν, 208), again nodding to the bird’s etymological association with song, while the bird’s ‘variegated neck’ (ποικιλόδειρον, 203) also hints at the variegated strain of its song, just like Homer’s πολυηχὴς φωνή.23 It is no surprise that this bird has been read as a figure for Hesiod himself from antiquity onwards.24

20 In the late archaic Homeric Hymn to Pan, the nightingale also appears pouring forth a honey-voiced song as a foil for Pan’s excellent piping (h. Hom. 19.14–18):25 ποτὶ δ᾿ ἕσπερον ἔκλαγεν οἶος ἄγρης ἐξανιών, δονάκων ὕπο μοῦσαν ἀθύρων νήδυμον· οὐκ ἂν τόν γε παραδράμοι ἐν μελέεσσιν ὄρνις, ἥ τ᾿ ἔαρος πολυανθέος ἐν πετάλοισιν θρῆνον ἐπιπροχέουσα χέει μελίγηρυν ἀοιδήν.

Towards evening, as he returns from the hunt, he sounds his note alone, playing sweet music from his reed pipes; not even she could surpass him in melodies – that bird who in much-blossoming spring pours out her honey-voiced song, pouring forth her lament amid the leaves. 21 The bird here is only introduced with the vague and generic ὄρνις, but identification as the nightingale is secured through an allusive echo of the Odyssey 19 simile,26 as well as the presence of ἀοιδήν: the noun again hints at the etymology of ἀηδών from ἀείδω, while also figuring the bird as a quasi-poet, an exemplar of musical achievement for Pan to surpass.

22 Already in many of our earliest extant texts of the Greek tradition, therefore, the nightingale was a recurring figure of song. And indeed, this association continued in the later literary tradition. Bacchylides too described himself as a nightingale (Κηίας ἀηδόνος, Bacchyl. 3.98);27 the speaker of Theogn. 939 claimed that he could not match the bird’s shrill voice (οὐ δύναμαι φωνῇ λίγ᾿ ἀειδέμεν ὥσπερ ἀηδών); and the appearance of a nightingale in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (17–18, 668–80) has even been read as a representation of Sophocles himself: not only is the bird located in

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Colonus, Sophocles’ native deme (OC 670), but it is also connected with Dionysus, the patron god of the tragic theatre (OC 674–80).28 More generally, the nightingale seems to have acquired a close connection with the Muses: in fragments of Euripides, we hear of an ἀηδόνων μουσεῖον (‘nightingales’ haunt of the Muses’, fr. 88 TrGF), and in another Palamedes is described as the ‘all-wise nightingale of the Muses’, celebrating his role as a creative figure of the arts (τὰν πάνσοφον … ἀηδόνα Μουσᾶν, fr. 588 TrGF).29 Through its association with both singing and the Muses, therefore, the nightingale proved a veritable ‘songbird’ from our earliest Greek poetry, a recurring model for poets of various genres.30

23 The same can also be said of the swan, which was closely connected with song, Apollo and the Muses from archaic poetry onwards.31 In the 21st Homeric Hymn addressed to Apollo, a song of only five lines, the swan verbally and structurally parallels the bard in singing of the god: Φοῖβε, σὲ μὲν καὶ κύκνος ὑπὸ πτερύγων λίγ᾿ἀείδει ὄχθῃ ἐπιθρῴσκων ποταμὸν πάρα δινήεντα Πηνειόν· σὲ δ᾿ ἀοιδὸς ἔχων φόρμιγγα λίγειαν ἡδυεπὴς πρῶτόν τε καὶ ὕστατον αἰὲν ἀείδει. καὶ σὺ μὲν οὕτω χαῖρε, ἄναξ· ἵλαμαι δέ σ᾿ ἀοιδῇ.

Phoebus, of you the swan too sings with a shrill note from its wings, leaping onto the bank beside the eddying river Peneius; and of you the sweet-versed bard always sings first and last with his shrill phorminx. And so rejoice, lord; I propitiate you with my song.

24 There is an elaborate symmetry here between swan and singer, articulated by the balanced μέν … δέ clauses. Both the bird and the poet sing of Apollo with a shrill tone (σέ … κύκνος … λίγ᾿ἀείδει ~ σὲ δ᾿ ἀοιδὸς ἔχων φόρμιγγα λίγειαν … ἀείδει), a parallelism which is reinforced by the presence of καί in v. 1: the swan (as well as the poet) sings of the god. The penultimate line also evokes another common etymological association of ἀείδω, here not connecting it with the nightingale, but rather with eternity (αἰέν). The poet emphasises the eternal celebrations of divine Apollo, shared by bard and bird.32

25 Beyond this hymn, the association of swan and song is visible in many other extant archaic and classical texts. Near the end of Alcman’s first Partheneion, the chorus compare its own (or an individual’s) singing to that of a swan at the streams of Xanthus ([ἀείδ]ει· | φθέγγεται δ᾿ [ἄρ᾿] ὥ[τ᾿ ἐπὶ] Ξάνθω ῥοαῖσι | κύκνος, fr. 1.99–101 PMGF), while a choral fragment of Pratinas (ascribed to a hyporchema) involves a similar comparison of singer and bird (708.3–5 PMG): ἐμὲ δεῖ παταγεῖν ἀν᾿ ὄρεα σύμενον μετὰ Ναϊάδων οἷά τε κύκνον ἄγοντα ποικιλόπτερον μέλος.

I must make a din, rushing up the mountains with the Naiads, like a swan leading a dapple-winged song.33

26 Moreover, the chorus of Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians pictures the melodious swan ‘rendering his service to the Muses’ (κύκνος μελῳδὸς Μούσας θεραπεύει, IT 1104– 5), a chorus member from Euripides’ Heracles Furens describes himself as a swan-like elderly singer (κύκνος ὣς γέρων ἀοιδός, HF 692), and in Plato’s Myth of Er in the Republic, the archetypal poet Orpheus is said to choose the soul of a swan for his

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reincarnation (just as Thamyris, another poet, chooses that of a nightingale) (Resp. 10.620a–b):34 ταύτην γὰρ δὴ ἔφη τὴν θέαν ἀξίαν εἶναι ἰδεῖν, ὡς ἕκασται αἱ ψυχαὶ ᾑροῦντο τοὺς βίους· ἐλεινήν τε γὰρ ἰδεῖν εἶναι καὶ γελοίαν καὶ θαυμασίαν. κατὰ συνήθειαν γὰρ τοῦ προτέρου βίου τὰ πολλὰ αἱρεῖσθαι. ἰδεῖν μὲν γὰρ ψυχὴν ἔφη τήν ποτε Ὀρφέως γενομένην κύκνου βίον αἱρουμένην, μίσει τοῦ γυναικείου γένους διὰ τὸν ὑπ᾽ ἐκείνων θάνατον οὐκ ἐθέλουσαν ἐν γυναικὶ γεννηθεῖσαν γενέσθαι· ἰδεῖν δὲ τὴν Θαμύρου ἀηδόνος ἑλομένην· ἰδεῖν δὲ καὶ κύκνον μεταβάλλοντα εἰς ἀνθρωπίνου βίου αἵρεσιν, καὶ ἄλλα ζῷα μουσικὰ ὡσαύτως.

Er said that the way in which the souls chose their lives was a sight worth seeing, since it was pitiful, funny, and surprising to watch. For the most part, their choice depended upon the character of their former life. For example, he said that he saw the soul that had once belonged to Orpheus choosing a swan’s life, because he hated the female sex because of his death at their hands, and so was unwilling to have a woman conceive and give birth to him. He saw the soul of Thamyris choosing the life of a nightingale, a swan choosing to change over to a human life, and other musical animals doing the same thing.35

27 Through all these archaic and classical examples, we see the persistent connection between swan and singer, a connection which continued to thrive into Hellenistic and Roman times (e.g. Callim. Hymn 4.249–54; Lucr. 4.180–82 = 909–11). Indeed, by the Augustan age, the topos of ‘poet as swan’ had become such a cliché that Horace humorously reworked it in Ode 2.20, literalising the motif into an actual swan- metamorphosis.36 Just like the nightingale, the swan thus proved a recurring symbol of poetic song.

28 To close this section, however, it is worth noting that these associations draw on a larger aetiological tradition which derived human voice and especially poetry from bird song.37 Alexander the Paphian records the tradition that as a baby Homer uttered the voices of nine different birds during the night (Vita Homeri 7, p. 253 Allen = Eust. Od. 1713.17–21): Ἀλέξανδρος δὲ ὁ Πάφιος ἱστορεῖ τὸν Ὅμηρον υἱὸν Αἰγυπτίων Δμασαγόρου καὶ Αἴθρας· τροφὸν δὲ αὐτοῦ προφῆτίν τινα θυγατέρα Ὤρου ἱερέως ῎Ισιδος, ἧς ἐκ τῶν μαστῶν μέλι ῥεῦσαί ποτε εἰς τὸ στόμα τοῦ παιδίου. καὶ τὸ βρέφος ἐν νυκτὶ φωνὰς ἐννέα προέσθαι· χελιδόνος, ταῶνος, περιστερᾶς, κορώνης, πέρδικος, πορφυρίωνος, ψαρός, ἀηδόνος καὶ κοττύφου.

Alexander the Paphian records that Homer was the son of the Egyptians Aethra and Dmasagoras and that his nurse was a prophetess, a daughter of Orus, the priest of Isis, from whose breasts honey once flowed into the little child’s mouth. During the night, the baby then uttered nine voices: the voice of a swallow, a peacock, a dove, a crow, a partridge, a water hen, a starling, a nightingale, and a blackbird.

29 Athenaeus provides further evidence for such traditions (Ath. 9.389f–390a). He cites some verses of Alcman in which the poet claims to have invented his song by imitating the cry of partridges (fr. 39 PMGF), as well as a remark by Chamaeleon of Pontus that the ancients invented music ‘from the birds which sing in lonely places’ (ἀπὸ τῶν ἐν ταῖς ἐρημίαις ᾀδόντων ὀρνίθων, fr. 24 Wehrli) – a view which is echoed in Lucretius’ claim that men were able ‘to imitate the shrill notes of birds’ (liquidas avium voces imitarier) long before they learnt to sing levia carmina (Lucr. 5.1379–81). Most relevant for our current investigation, however, is Democritus’ own version of this claim,

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preserved by Plutarch, which specifies the swan and the nightingale as the direct source of mankind’s mimetic inspiration (Democritus 68 B154 D–K = 27 D203 L–M = Plut. De soll. an. 20.974a):38 … τὰ ζῷα …, ὧν ὁ Δημόκριτος ἀποφαίνει μαθητὰς ἐν τοῖς μεγίστοις γεγονότας ἡμᾶς· ἀράχνης <ἐν> ὑφαντικῇ καὶ ἀκεστικῇ, χελιδόνος ἐν οἰκοδομίᾳ, καὶ τῶν λιγυρῶν, κύκνου καὶ ἀηδόνος, ἐν ᾠδῇ κατὰ μίμησιν.

… animals … of which Democritus affirms that we have been the pupils in the most important matters: of the spider for weaving and mending; of the swallow for house building; of the shrill birds, the swan and the nightingale, for song, by imitation.39

30 These examples demonstrate that there was a long and well-established tradition in antiquity of associating birds – especially the nightingale and the swan – with both poetry and song. At some point, however, these two birds also gained a particularly elegiac resonance. By the third century BCE at the latest, both came to symbolise not just song in general, but elegiac poetry in particular. Elegy never gained an exclusive hold on either bird, but – as we shall see – the pair proved particularly apt emblems of the genre and were repeatedly employed to represent it to the exclusion of other possible candidates such as the swallow, rooster or partridge. The swan and nightingale had always been prominent in the earlier tradition of ‘avian poetics’ (though not particularly in elegy), but from the Hellenistic period onwards they began to dominate its elegiac strand. In the following sections, I shall trace the evidence for this development, studying each bird in turn, before moving to ask bigger questions about the broader significance of this elegiac association.

III. The Elegiac Nightingale

31 As the examples we have already explored demonstrate, the nightingale was associated with grief and lamentation ever since the time of Homer.40 Already in the Odyssey, the bird was pictured ‘lamenting for her dear son Itylus’ (παῖδ’ ὀλοφυρομένη Ἴτυλον φίλον, Od. 19.522); the Hesiodic ainos features the nightingale ‘wailing pitiably’ (ἣ δ’ ἐλεόν … | μύρετο, Op. 205–6); and in the Homeric Hymn to Pan the bird pours forth a θρῆνον (‘lament’, h. Hom. 19.18).41 All of these examples presuppose the mythical tradition of the nightingale’s metamorphosis from a mother who killed her son, either by accident or by design. Most familiar to us is the myth of Procne and Philomela, as told most famously by Ovid (Met. 6.412–674), in which Procne actively took revenge on her Thracian husband Tereus for his horrendous rape and mutilation of her sister Philomela by murdering their son and serving Tereus his flesh.42 Yet Homer’s simile seems to evoke a different version of events, in which a certain Aedon was married to the Theban Zethus and, in jealousy at her sister-in-law Niobe’s many children, plotted to kill one of her nephews but accidentally killed her own son instead.43 These are significant mythical variants, further compounded by an alternative version of the Procne/Philomela myth in which the raped Philomela, rather than the child-murdering Procne, was transformed into the nightingale (Ovid himself acknowledges this typological confusion at the end of his narrative with the intentionally ambiguous altera … altera, Met. 6.668–69).44 Despite these variations in the mythical record, however, there are key fixed elements in all versions of the myth: the mother’s filicide,

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her ensuing grief, and the subsequent nightingale-transformation of a grieving woman (be it the mourning mother or her raped sister).

32 This mythical baggage rendered the nightingale a ready model for poetic lament. It is no surprise that the nightingale’s song is explicitly referred to as ἔλεγοι already in Aristophanes’ Birds (Av. 218), while in tragedy the bird is repeatedly associated with lamentation, especially of women who have lost a loved one – a gendered aspect to which we shall return at the end of this section.45 By the Hellenistic period, however, this lamentatory connection appears to have gained a particularly elegiac resonance. Our clearest evidence for this association comes in three different poems, two by Callimachus and one by Posidippus.

33 In the first, Callimachus’ famous epigram for the dead Heraclitus, the poet proudly proclaims that death will never take away his friend’s ‘nightingales’ (AP 7.80 = 2 Pf. = 34 HE [1203–8]): Εἶπέ τις, Ἡράκλειτε, τεὸν μόρον, ἐς δέ με δάκρυ ἤγαγεν· ἐμνήσθην δ᾽ ὁσσάκις ἀμφότεροι ἥλιον ἐν λέσχῃ κατεδύσαμεν. ἀλλὰ σὺ μέν που, ξεῖν᾽ Ἁλικαρνησεῦ, τετράπαλαι σποδιή, αἱ δὲ τεαὶ ζώουσιν ἀηδόνες, ᾗσιν ὁ πάντων ἁρπακτὴς Ἀίδης οὐκ ἐπὶ χεῖρα βαλεῖ.

Someone told me, Heraclitus, of your fate and brought me to tears; I remembered how often the two of us had set the sun with our talking. But you, my Halicarnassian friend, are long ago ash, I suppose; yet your nightingales still live on, upon which Hades, the snatcher of all, will not cast his hands. 34 The notion of living ἀηδόνες hints at the birds’ etymological connection with the adverb ἀεί, evoking the immortality of poetry in the face of death (cf n.32 above). But the choice of the bird here may also have a larger significance. Not only does its lamentatory associations fit with this threnodic epigram for a lost friend in elegiac couplets, but it also evokes the nature of Heraclitus’ own poetry. Diogenes Laertius, who quotes this epigram, records that Heraclitus was himself an ‘elegiac poet’ (ἐλεγείας ποιητής, Diog. Laert. 9.17), which has prompted some scholars to speculate that ‘nightingales’ may even represent an actual title of a collection by Heraclitus.46 Whether or not this was the case, however, the designation of his elegiac output as ‘nightingales’ is particularly suggestive of a connection between the birds and elegy.

35 This connection is equally strong in Callimachus’ Bath of Pallas, the only elegiac poem in his collection of six hymns. After Teiresias has lost his vision for unwittingly catching sight of Athena bathing naked, his grieving mother Chariclo is explicitly compared to a nightingale (Hymn 5.93–96): ἁ μὲν <ἅμ᾿> ἀμφοτέραισι φίλον περὶ παῖδα λαβοῖσα μάτηρ μὲν γοερᾶν οἶτον ἀηδονίδων ἆγε βαρὺ κλαίοισα, θεὰ δ᾿ ἐλέησεν ἑταίραν καί νιν Ἀθαναία πρὸς τόδ᾿ ἔλεξεν ἔπος

The mother embraced her dear son with both her arms and performed the mournful nightingales’ lament, wailing heavily; the goddess took pity on her companion and spoke this word to her. 36 These verses are loaded with the language of mourning and grief (γοερᾶν, οἶτον, βαρὺ κλαίοισα), building on Chariclo’s previous words (85–92), which had already evoked the

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world of funeral lamentation by playing on the equivalence of the loss of sight and the loss of life.47 This nightingale comparison is particularly suggestive of elegy, however, because of the assonant verse ends of 95–96 (ἐλέησεν ἑταίραν … ἔλεξεν ἔπος), phrasing which evokes the very sound of ‘elegy’ and its etymological association with ἔλεος, ‘pity’.48 Such a metapoetic interpretation is reinforced by the wider context of this episode, which takes place at Hippocrene on Mt Helicon, a loaded site of poetic initiation (Hymn 5.71). Scholars have previously noted how Teiresias’ encounter with Athena and his attempt to drink from Hippocrene parallel both Hesiod’s and Callimachus’ poetic investiture at the same location (Aet. frr. 2–2j Harder),49 but this poetological setting also lends further significance to Chariclo’s nightingale-song: it is as if she too is initiated into the world of elegiac song by Athena. At this moment of motherly grief (akin to that of Procne), elegy, lament and the nightingale coalesce.50

37 Our final Hellenistic example comes from Posidippus’ Seal Poem (118 A–B = SH 705), in which the poet sings programmatically of his old age and impending death. As a poem of at least 28 lines, it straddles the boundary between epigram and elegy, like many other sphragistic epigrams, and probably stood at the start or end of a collection.51 After invoking both Apollo and the Muses, the poet twice compares himself to Archilochus, ‘the Parian’ (Παρίου, 118.12; Παρίηι, 118.19). First, he establishes the archaic poet as a direct model, wishing to enjoy similar posthumous honours to those which Archilochus enjoyed (118.12–16).52 But then he distances himself from him; Posidippus wants nobody to shed a tear for himself (μηδέ τις οὖν χεύαι δάκρυον, 118.24), but instead invites his audience to lament for Archilochus, now described as a ‘Parian nightingale’ (118.19–21): ἀλλ’ ἐπὶ μὲν Παρίηι δὸς ἀηδόνι λυγρὸν ἐφ . [ νῆμα κατὰ γληνέων δάκρυα κε̣ι̣ν̣ὰ̣ χ̣έ̣ω̣[ν καὶ στενάχων, δ̣ι’ ἐμὸν δὲ φίλον στό̣μα [

Grant a mournful thread to the Parian nightingale …, casting empty tears from your eyelids and groaning, but through my dear mouth … 38 Lloyd-Jones observed that this description taps into the common use of ἀηδών as a synonym for ‘poet’.53 But here too, the association is particularly suggestive of an elegiac poet.54 As in Callimachus’ Hymn, these lines are suffused with the language of lamentation (λυγρόν, δάκρυα, στενάχων), and Archilochus himself – like Callimachus’ Heraclitus – was a foremost elegiac poet, considered in antiquity one of the possible founders of the genre.55 Indeed, through the opposition he sets up, Posidippus seems to be suggesting a generic contrast between Archilochus’ mournful elegies and his own epigrammatic corpus. Whereas Archilochus deserves a libation of tears, Posidippus requests a different kind of tribute; Lloyd-Jones’ suggestion of a wine offering is particularly attractive, since it would effectively encapsulate the sympotic nature of many Posidippan epigrams.56 As in Callimachus’ Hymn and Epigram, therefore, the nightingale here has a particularly elegiac resonance, and seems to form part of a poetic recusatio in which Posidippus distances himself from tearful elegy in favour of vinous epigram.

39 Although these poems offer no more than isolated hints, therefore, it seems that at least Callimachus and Posidippus already exploited the association between elegy and lament in the third century BCE, keyed through the figure of the nightingale. All three poems associate nightingales with mourning and elegiac song: in two cases (the

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epigrams), this association is specifically connected to elegiac poets (Heraclitus and Archilochus), while in the third (the elegiac hymn), the generic connection is reinforced by the wider metapoetic context of the scene and the knowing etymological allusion in ἐλέησεν. In developing this link between the nightingale and elegy, both poets may well have been responding to contemporary scholarly debate on the nature of the genre. Yet whatever the scholarly background, it is clear that – for them – the bird was an apt symbol of elegiac lamentation.

40 It is in Roman poetry, however, where this association of nightingale and elegy becomes particularly established and pronounced. In Catullus 65, the poet compares his mournful poetry after the death of his brother to the song of the lamenting nightingale (Catull. 65.11–16): at certe semper amabo, semper maesta tua carmina morte canam, qualia sub densis ramorum concinit umbris Daulias, absumpti fata gemens Ityli.— sed tamen in tantis maeroribus, Ortale, mitto haec expressa tibi carmina Battiadae

But surely I will always love you, always will I sing elegies made gloomy by your death, such as the Daulian bird sings beneath the branches’ dense shade, lamenting the fate of slain Itylus.—Yet amidst such great sorrows, O Hortalus, I send you these verses translated from Battiades.

41 These verses readily recall the metapoetic nightingale of the Odyssey who similarly lamented for her son Itylus (Ἴτυλον, Od. 19.522 ~ Ityli, 65.14) amid dense foliage (δενδρέων ἐν πετάλοισι καθεζομένη πυκινοῖσιν, Od. 19.520 ~ sub densis ramorum … umbris, 65.13).57 As in the Odyssey, the language here reinforces the connection between poet and bird: both sing (canam, 12 ~ concinit, 13), while Catullus’ maesta carmina (12) parallel the bird’s lament (gemens, 14). The repetition of semper in 11–12 accentuates the incessant nature of the poet’s grief, while also offering another pun on the etymological connection between ἀηδών, ἀεί and ἀείδω, wordplay that we have already seen repeatedly in our Greek examples.58 The nightingale stands here as a figure for Catullus’ elegiac poetics, the loss of his brother motivating his song, just like the nightingale’s loss of her son. But the connection receives even more programmatic significance from the fact that this poem appears to have inaugurated a whole libellus of Catullan elegiac poetry (Catull. 65–116).59 In that case, the nightingale stands as a model not only for this elegiac poem but also for Catullus’ whole elegiac collection. Moreover, the metrically identical placement of carmina in verses 12 and 16 suggests an identification between Catullus’ maesta carmina and Callimachus’ elegiac ‘Lock of Berenice’, a translation of which follows as poem 66. It is as if Catullus appropriates his Hellenistic predecessor as a model for this poetics of nightingale elegy, perhaps even nodding back to Callimachus’ metaliterary exploitation of the bird in his own elegiac works.60 After all, the bird’s association elsewhere with sleeplessness (Hes. fr. 312 M–W) renders it an apt model of another prized Callimachean trait, the ἀγρυπνίη which he praises in Aratus (AP 9.507.4 = 27.4 Pf. = 56.4 HE [1300]).61 Already in Catullus, therefore, the nightingale was a clear symbol of elegiac (and Callimachean) poetics.

42 Catullus was far from isolated at Rome in his use of the nightingale comparison, however. The motif was picked up and developed by later elegists, especially by Ovid. In

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Amores 2.6, the epicedion for Corinna’s dead parrot, Ovid asks Philomela to stop lamenting her son and turn to this new cause of sorrow (2.6.7–10): quod scelus Ismarii quereris, Philomela, tyranni, expleta est annis ista querela suis; alitis in rarae miserum devertere funus: magna sed antiqua est causa doloris Itys.

The crime of the Ismarian tyrant of which you complain, Philomela, that complaint has been exhausted by its allotted years; turn your attention to the sad funeral of an exquisite bird—Itys is a great, but ancient, cause for grief.

43 As in Catullus 65, these verses are suffused with the language of lament (quereris, 7; querela, 8; miserum … funus, 9; causa doloris, 10) and framed by further attestations of grief (maestis … capillis, 5; dole, 12). The nightingale (here Philomela) is picked out first among all birds (aves, 2; volucres, 3) for its doleful plaint. Ovid captures something of its repetitive cries in verses 9–10: as McKeown notes, Itys’ name frames the couplet (alITIS … ITYS), just as the bird often repeats that name elsewhere (perhaps an allusive nod to Catullus’ etymologising of ἀηδών through the repetition of semper at Catull. 65.11–12).62 There is considerable – even outrageous – humour in the poet’s request to the bird, aligning the grief at Tereus’ crime and Itys’ death with the more mundane sorrow felt at the passing of his beloved’s pet. But here too, this description of the nightingale gains a particularly metapoetic resonance, in this case from the larger avian allegories at play in Amores 2.6. It is well known that the poem is an imitative re-run of Catullus 3 on Lesbia’s dead sparrow (marked as such at the outset: the bird is an imitatrix ales, 2.6.1), and that the parrot in many ways serves as a figure for Ovid.63 Within the context of such self-conscious reflection, Ovid’s prominent description of the mourning nightingale at the outset of his poem establishes the bird as a model for his own elegiac mourning. Amores 2.6 looks back not only to the Catullan passer, but also to the elegiac nightingale of Carmen 65.

44 In Ovid’s Fasti, meanwhile, the bird recurs at another metaliterary moment, in the context of the goddess Ceres’ loss of her daughter Persephone, the same myth which Philitas had previously treated in his elegiac Demeter (Fast. 4.481–86): quacumque ingreditur, miseris loca cuncta querellis implet, ut amissum cum gemit ales Ityn, perque vices modo ‘Persephone!’ modo ‘filia!’ clamat, clamat et alternis nomen utrumque ciet. sed neque Persephone Cererem nec filia matrem audit, et alternis nomen utrumque perit.

And wherever she went, she filled every place with her sad complaints, as when the bird laments her lost Itys. In turn she cried, now “Persephone!”, now “daughter!” She cried and shouted either name alternately; but neither Persephone heard Ceres, nor did the daughter hear her mother; both names died away alternately.

45 The nightingale laments (gemit, 482), just as it did in Catullus (gemens, 65.14), and Ceres’ sad complaints (miseris … querellis, 481) recall key terms of the elegiac genre. As in Callimachus’ Bath of Pallas, this nightingale is not directly associated with the poet, but rather with one of Ovid’s internal characters, but here too the passage is loaded with a strong generic self-consciousness. As Stephens Hinds has highlighted, the repetition of alternis (484, 486) not only nods to the alternation of Ceres’ cries, one moment calling

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on ‘Persephone’, the next on her ‘daughter’ (filia), but it also acts as an ‘arch programmatic hint’ that this lament is ‘written in the “alternating” hexameters and pentameters of the elegiac rhythm’; Ovid uses alternus in precisely this metrical sense on a number of other occasions.64 Moreover, the description of Ceres filling every place with her complaints (miseris loca cuncta querellis | implet, 481–82) echoes Hermesianax’s Antimachus, who similarly ‘filled’ his books with tears (γόων δ᾿ ἐνεπλήσατο βίβλους, fr. 7.45 Powell); her behaviour parallels that of other elegiac poets, reinforcing the metapoetic potential of this passage. Within the narrative context, however, this simile is extremely jarring: Procne mourning the death of her son (or Philomela mourning her own rape) is a dissonant comparandum for Ceres’ lament for Prosperina. Might this perhaps hint that Ceres is not so much the innocent mother of a raped child but somehow complicit in her daughter’s loss? If so, it is not clear precisely what we should make of this implication, but given Ceres’ presentation as a kind of poetic figure, it could resonate particularly fruitfully with Ovid’s tradition of his own elegiac crimen: Procne’s ‘crime’ in vengefully killing her son serves as a parallel and foil for Ovid’s own elegiac errors. Here too, the lamenting nightingale thus proves a particularly appropriate symbol for the strains (and sins) of elegy.

46 This connection between the nightingale and elegy appears to have run so deep in Ovid’s corpus that it could be activated even when the bird and its myth were not directly mentioned. In the programmatic proem of Ovid’s third book of Amores, for example, the poet wanders amid a crowd of lamenting birds (Am. 3.1.1–10): Stat vetus et multos incaedua silva per annos; credibile est illi numen inesse loco. fons sacer in medio speluncaque pumice pendens, et latere ex omni dulce queruntur aves. hic ego dum spatior tectus nemoralibus umbris— quod mea, quaerebam, Musa moveret opus— venit odoratos Elegia nexa capillos, et, puto, pes illi longior alter erat. forma decens, vestis tenuissima, vultus amantis, et pedibus vitium causa decoris erat.

There stands an ancient wood, uncut for many years; you could believe that there is a divine power in that place. In the middle is a sacred spring and a cave with overhanging rock, and from every side the birds complain sweetly. While I was walking here, covered by the grove’s shadows, wondering what work my Muse would set in motion, Elegy approached me, with her perfumed hair tied up and, I think, with one foot longer than the other. Her form was comely, her clothes very thin, her face that of a lover, and the imperfection in her feet was a source of grace.

47 This poem is deeply self-conscious, especially in its description of personified Elegy, evoking key aspects of the genre’s aesthetic and metrical identity (e.g. tenuissima, 9; pedibus vitium, 10).65 But the opening lines are also suggestive of a more general metapoetic environment: as is well known, silva, like the Greek ὕλη, can evoke the raw material of poetry; yet here it is both vetus (‘old’) and incaedua (‘uncut’), suggesting a paradoxical combination of ancestral tradition and untested originality.66 Ovid hints that he is building on the well-established elegiac tradition, but simultaneously taking it along experimental paths. Part of this originality may be his less direct evocation of the nightingale motif; the bird is not named explicitly, but still reverberates in the background. The mention of ‘sweetly complaining’ birds (4) is alone enough to suggest

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nightingales; indeed, the same phrase reappears in Heroides 15 with a similar connotation (dulce queruntur aves, Her. 15.152, see below).67 But more significantly, the poet himself appears to play the role of the nightingale here, lamenting in isolation and covered by the shadows of the wood (tectus nemoralibus umbris), just as the singing bird is repeatedly depicted elsewhere.68 In this most programmatic of poems, featuring Ovid’s encounter with the personification of Elegy herself, the poet is figured as a solitary nightingale in the woods, alongside a host of other sweetly complaining birds.

48 This nexus of solitude, mourning and the natural world appears to build on Propertius 1.18, an elegy which the poet closes by similarly picturing himself in the wilderness with only birds as companions (Prop. 1.18.25–30): omnia consuevi timidus perferre superbae iussa, neque arguto facta dolore queri. pro quo continui montes et frigida rupes et datur inculto tramite dura quies; et quodcumque meae possunt narrare querelae cogor ad argutas dicere solus aves.

I have grown accustomed to endure the orders of an arrogant woman timidly, and not to complain in shrill grief about her actions. In return for this, I am given endless mountains, cold rocks, and comfortless rest on a wild path. And all that my complaints can tell I am forced to utter in solitude to the shrill birds.

49 Here too, just as in Amores 3.1, the poet wanders alone in a scene with loaded elegiac terminology. Having avoided complaining to Cynthia’s face, he now utters his elegiac querelae (29) alone to shrill birds (argutas … aves, 30). As in Am. 3.1, these birds are not identified any more specifically, but the parallel contexts of isolation (solus, 30), lamentation (queri, 26; querelae, 29) and the natural landscape (27–28) suggest that here too they represent nightingales, the very bird whose behaviour the poet mimics. The repetition of argutus to describe both the poet’s grief (26) and the birds’ cries (30) certainly encourages an association of the two.69 Ovid’s programmatic poem may thus have already found precedent in Propertius’ lonely, nightingale-like wanderings in the Monobiblos.

50 The connection between elegy and nightingale is felt most strongly, however, in the fifteenth epistle of Ovid’s Heroides, a poem of contested authorship which features Sappho lamenting for the love of Phaon.70 The elegiac tenor of the poem is established explicitly at its opening, when Sappho claims that ‘I must weep for my love; elegy is the song of tears’ (flendus amor meus est; elegiae flebile carmen, Her. 15.7), but it is near the end of the epistle that this amatory grief is explicitly paralleled with that of the nightingale (Her. 15.151–56): quin etiam rami positis lugere videntur frondibus, et nullae dulce queruntur aves; sola virum non ulta pie maestissima mater concinit Ismarium Daulias ales Ityn. ales Ityn, Sappho desertos cantat amores — hactenus; ut media cetera nocte silent.

Why, even the branches seem to mourn, casting their leaves aside, and no birds sweetly complain; only the most sorrowful mother, the Daulian bird who took unholy vengeance on her husband, sings of Ismarian Itys. The bird sings of Itys, Sappho of abandoned loves – that is all; the rest is as silent as midnight.

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51 Regardless of the actual authorship of this elegiac epistle, it too clearly evokes the association of nightingale and lament and echoes many of the passages that we have explored above. We have already noted the half-line repetition of dulce queruntur aves, also found at Amores 3.1.4, but the poem contains many further allusive connections. As in Catullus 65, the nightingale sings (concinit, 154 ~ concinit, Catull. 65.13) and is identified as Daulian (Daulias, 154 ~ Daulias, Catull. 65.14), a rare adjective which appears elsewhere only in other later imitations of Catullus.71 But she has now become maestissima mater (153), the superlative adjective agonistically outdoing Catullus’ own maesta carmina (65.12). In addition, the rare adjective Ismarium (154) recalls for us Ovid’s epicedion for Corinna’s parrot (Ismarii, Am. 2.6.7), where it was used to describe not Itys, but his father Tereus; the genealogical relationship may figure the intertextual connection between the two poems,72 but it also highlights the resemblance of the two characters, a key part of the myth: it is precisely Itys’ similarity to his father that prompts Procne to kill him (Met. 6.619–23).73 Immediately after this passage, meanwhile, ‘Sappho’ describes a sacred spring (15.157–60) in language which recalls the opening of Amores 3.1 (esp. fons sacer, numen), reinforcing the connection with that programmatic depiction of the nightingale-poet.74 Within a handful of verses, the epistle draws on many parts of the tradition that we have explored above.

52 As in those other passages, the connection between bird and poet is active here, rendered explicit by the parallelism of verse 155: Sappho, a ready model for poetic activity, sings of her lost love, just as the bird does her lost son. In this case, the connection also seems to draw on Sappho’s particularly strong associations with the nightingale: she was compared with the bird by a number of ancient writers, mentioned it in her poetry (fr. 136 Voigt), and is the likely source for the rare epithet Daulias.75 Ovid, however, transforms this Sapphic background into a particularly elegiac form by having the poetess sing of amores – the only plural use of this noun in the whole poem. At this moment when Sappho seems most like a nightingale, she also seems most like Ovid himself, the author of the elegiac Amores.76 This passage thus epitomises the trend that we have been tracing through Hellenistic and Roman poetry: the nightingale is associated with specifically mournful and elegiac composition. By the time of this poem, the association of elegy and nightingale appears to have become an extremely well-established trope, centred on song, mourning and bereavement.

53 In fact, this association ran so deep in the literary mentality of Rome that it could also be evoked in other genres besides elegy, part of the larger generic ‘mixing’ of this period.77 At the end of Virgil’s Georgics, Orpheus is compared to the nightingale after he has lost his wife Eurydice for a second time. And here too, despite the poem’s didactic hexameters, the comparison gains a particularly elegiac resonance (Georg. 4.507–20): septem illum totos perhibent ex ordine mensis rupe sub aëria deserti ad Strymonis undam flesse sibi, et gelidis haec evolvisse sub antris mulcentem tigris et agentem carmine quercus: qualis populea maerens philomela sub umbra amissos queritur fetus, quos durus arator observans nido implumis detraxit; at illa flet noctem, ramoque sedens miserabile carmen integrat, et maestis late loca questibus implet. nulla Venus, non ulli animum flexere hymenaei: solus Hyperboreas glacies Tanaimque nivalem arvaque Riphaeis numquam viduata pruinis

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lustrabat, raptam Eurydicen atque inrita Ditis dona querens.

They say that he wept to himself for seven whole months, one after the other, beneath a lofty crag beside the stream of the lonely Strymon, and unfolded this whole tale beneath ice-cold caves, charming tigers and leading forth oaks with his song: just as the nightingale, mourning beneath a poplar’s shade, laments her lost offspring, which a heartless ploughman has observed and snatched unfledged from the nest; she weeps throughout the night, perched on a branch, and repeats her pitiable song, filling all around with her mournful complaints. No thought of love or wedding song could divert his soul. Alone he would roam the ice of the Hyperborean north, the snowy Tanais and the fields that were never free from Riphaean hoar-frost, lamenting his lost Eurydice and the useless gift of Dis.

54 In this simile, the myth of the nightingale has been translated into georgic ‘reality’, as the bird loses her chicks to a heartless farmer, rather than her own hand.78 But here too, the bird carries a strong metapoetic and elegiac resonance. A series of verbal echoes establish a parallel between the nightingale and Orpheus, another archetypal poet-figure: both weep (flesse, 509 ~ flet, 514) and both mournfully lament their lost loved ones (querens, 520 ~ maerens … queritur, 511–12; maestis … questibus, 515).79 Alone, these words are enough to conjure up the world of elegiac lament, especially in their echoes of the language of Catullus 65 (particularly his maesta carmina, 65.12). But there are other features of this passage which together reinforce the configuration of Orpheus as a specifically elegiac poet: the nightingale to which he is compared sings a miserabile carmen (514), just like Horace’s description of miserabilis elegy (Carm. 1.33.2– 3); and it even fills the whole place with lament, just like Demeter in Ovid’s Fasti (maestis late loca questibus implet, 515 ~ miseris loca cuncta querellis | implet, Fast. 4.481–82).80 The language of the scene paints Orpheus in distinctively elegiac terms.

55 Moreover, this elegiac framework even extends beyond the figures of the poet and bird to incorporate the destructive farmer who snatches away the nightingale’s young. Richard Thomas has noted the intratextual connection with Virgil’s earlier description of the angry farmer (iratus … arator) in Georgics 2, who uproots and destroys birds’ homes in converting woods to ploughlands (Georg. 2.207–11). But this georgic scene now receives an elegiac re-branding, as the arator becomes no longer iratus, but rather durus, just like the hard and stern mistresses of elegiac poetry.81 The mournful tones of the elegiac nightingale are thus set against the heartlessness of the farmer, mirroring the elegiac relationship of suffering poet and stern puella. Combined with the scene’s emphasis on sorrow and lament, Virgil thus seals Orpheus’ depiction as a specifically elegiac poet. Notably, Virgil likely had Hellenistic precedent for this elegiac rendering of Orpheus: the elegist Phanocles similarly presented Orpheus in an elegiac vein in his Ἔρωτες ἢ Καλοί (‘Loves or Beautiful Youths’), recounting his death in Thrace and burial on Lesbos (fr. 1 Powell: an episode notably concerned with ‘dire grief’, δεινόν … ἄχος, fr. 1.24 Powell). Following Phanocles’ example, Virgil crafts Orpheus through a particularly elegiac lens, reinforced above all by the nightingale simile.82

56 In Hellenistic and Roman poetry, therefore, the nightingale became a recurring figure of elegy, repeatedly symbolising the lamentatory background of its poetics both within and outside the genre. The bird was associated not only with mourning mothers (Chariclo, Ceres), whose suffering mirrors that of Procne, but also with a wide range of poets – and especially male poets (Heraclitus, Archilochus, Catullus, Ovid and Orpheus). The nightingale comparison thus no doubt contributed to a familiar strategy of Roman

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love elegy, the poet’s self-feminisation: in aligning themselves and other male poets with a grieving mother, Roman poets once more blurred traditional social divisions of gender and power. But here too we can detect Hellenistic precedent for this trend: Posidippus’ fashioning of Archilochus as an elegiac nightingale may hint at the feminine quality of the archaic poet’s lamentations, especially given Archilochus’ own characterisation of mourning as ‘womanly’ (γυναικεῖον πένθος, fr. 13.10 W2). In addition to this gendered aspect, however, this recurring use of the nightingale also adds to the Roman love elegists’ playful re-reading of elegy’s lamentatory origins: it is one thing to adopt Procne’s maternal grief as an analogue for other grievances or bereavements (e.g. Catullus’ loss of his brother), but quite another to redeploy this specific example of extreme lamentation as a paradigm for the more trivial matters of elegiac love. In adopting the bird as an emblem of the genre, Roman elegists played self-consciously with the distance between Procne’s mythical misery and their own humbler sorrows.

57 Besides these thematic considerations, however, the recurring choice of the nightingale as an elegiac emblem also has a larger aesthetic significance. We shall explore this in Section V below, but let us first turn to the second major bird of elegiac song: the swan.

IV. The Elegiac Swan

58 Like the nightingale, the swan had a tradition attached to it that rendered it a particularly suitable model of lamentation. The legend ran that swans on the point of death would break out into beautiful song, proleptically lamenting their demise, a legend that is mentioned by many ancient authors, with varying degrees of credulity. Pliny denies it on the basis of sinister personal ‘experiments’ (HN 10.32), but there in fact seems to be scientific grounding to the myth, as Geoffrey Arnott has shown, highlighting that doubts in antiquity seem to be due to the confusion of two different species, the mute swan and the whooper swan.83 In any case, the tradition was already well established by the fifth century. The legend is presupposed by several Aesopic fables (233, 399 Perry), as well as Clytemnestra’s comparison of Cassandra to the swan in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon: ‘like a swan’, she has ‘sung her final dirge of death’ (ἣ δέ τοι κύκνου δίκην | τὸν ὕστατον μέλψασα θανάσιμον γόον, Ag. 1444–45).84 Its popularity is also suggested by the Platonic Socrates’ attempt to re-explain the phenomenon in the Phaedo. According to him, swans sing beautifully before their death not in lamentation, but rather in joy that they are soon to meet their master, Apollo (Phd. 84e–85b): καί, ὡς ἔοικε, τῶν κύκνων δοκῶ φαυλότερος ὑμῖν εἶναι τὴν μαντικήν, οἳ ἐπειδὰν αἴσθωνται ὅτι δεῖ αὐτοὺς ἀποθανεῖν, ᾄδοντες καὶ ἐν τῷ πρόσθεν χρόνῳ, τότε δὴ πλεῖστα καὶ κάλλιστα ᾄδουσι, γεγηθότες ὅτι μέλλουσι παρὰ τὸν θεὸν ἀπιέναι οὗπέρ εἰσι θεράποντες. οἱ δ’ ἄνθρωποι διὰ τὸ αὑτῶν δέος τοῦ θανάτου καὶ τῶν κύκνων καταψεύδονται, καί φασιν αὐτοὺς θρηνοῦντας τὸν θάνατον ὑπὸ λύπης ἐξᾴδειν, καὶ οὐ λογίζονται ὅτι οὐδὲν ὄρνεον ᾄδει ὅταν πεινῇ ἢ ῥιγῷ ἤ τινα ἄλλην λύπην λυπῆται, οὐδὲ αὐτὴ ἥ τε ἀηδὼν καὶ χελιδὼν καὶ ὁ ἔποψ, ἃ δή φασι διὰ λύπην θρηνοῦντα ᾄδειν. ἀλλ’ οὔτε ταῦτά μοι φαίνεται λυπούμενα ᾄδειν οὔτε οἱ κύκνοι, ἀλλ’ ἅτε οἶμαι τοῦ Ἀπόλλωνος ὄντες, μαντικοί τέ εἰσι καὶ προειδότες τὰ ἐν Ἅιδου ἀγαθὰ ᾄδουσι καὶ τέρπονται ἐκείνην τὴν ἡμέραν διαφερόντως ἢ ἐν τῷ ἔμπροσθεν χρόνῳ.

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Moreover it seems you think I’m inferior in my prophesying to the swans who, when they perceive that they must die, although they could sing before, they now sing at their loudest and most beautiful, rejoicing in the fact that they’re about to go to the god whose servants they are. But human beings, because of their own fear of dying, interpret the swans wrongly and say they’re lamenting death and singing out through grief, and they don’t take into account that no bird sings when it’s hungry or cold, or suffering any other kind of distress, not even the nightingale or the swallow or the hoopoe, who they say are lamenting and singing through grief. But it doesn’t seem to me they’re grieving, nor are the swans, but rather, I believe, in as much as they belong to Apollo, they have both prophetic power, and are singing with foreknowledge of good things in Hades and are taking delight on that day more than ever before.85

59 As often elsewhere, Plato here goes against the current of mainstream thought, challenging not only the legend of the prophetic swan, but also the mythical aetiology of Procne, Tereus and Philomela. In spite of his efforts, however, the traditional association of swans and lamentation continued throughout antiquity and still resonates today in modern English idiom, where a ‘swan song’ is a sort of ‘last hurrah’. Given that swans were also closely connected with Venus, the goddess of love, it is thus no surprise that this bird too was appropriated by Roman elegy as another apt image of its own poetics.86 In comparison to the nightingale analogy, we can find less Hellenistic precedent here (restricted to Callimachus’ Aetia prologue, discussed in Section V), but elegy’s association with the swan was enthusiastically developed at Rome, especially by Ovid.

60 In the proem of the fifth book of Ovid’s Tristia, the exiled poet programmatically asserts that flebile carmen is the only match for his current flebilis situation (Trist. 5.1.5–6), before going on to compare his lot to that of the prescient swan (Trist. 5.1.9–14): ut cecidi, subiti perago praeconia casus, sumque argumenti conditor ipse mei. utque iacens ripa deflere Caystrius ales dicitur ore suam deficiente necem, sic ego, Sarmaticas longe proiectus in oras, efficio tacitum ne mihi funus eat.

Since I have fallen, I act as herald of my sudden fall, and I myself am the author of my own theme. Just as the bird of the Cayster is said to lie on the bank and bewail its own death from its failing voice, so I, cast far away upon the Sarmatian shores, ensure that my funeral rites do not pass in silence.

61 Instead of the Daulian bird of the Sapphic epistle, here we have that of the Cayster, a river which was particularly known in antiquity for its swans.87 But this avian parallel reflects the weeping strain of elegy equally well (cf. deflere, 11). The very word which Ovid uses of his theme, argumentum (10), may sonically recall the adjective argutus which Propertius used in 1.18 of both his shrill dolor and the shrill birds: here too, Ovid’s topic involves a pointedly lamentatory strain. But in particular, the swan’s association with impending death alongside mourning makes it a particularly apt image for the funereal life of Ovid’s exile, assimilating it to a figurative demise.88 Elsewhere in the Tristia, too, Ovid compares himself to a swan in a similar manner, as in 4.8, where the bird’s plumage parallels his own aging and whitening hair (iam me cycneas imitantur tempora plumas, ‘Already my temples resemble a swan’s plumage’, 4.8.1).89 The bird thus seems to have been a particularly apt symbol for the internalized elegiac grief of Ovid’s exile.

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62 Yet the bird was not solely the preserve of Ovid’s exilic oeuvre. In another of Ovid’s Heroides, Dido opens her address to Aeneas by comparing herself to the swan (Her. 7.1– 2): sic ubi fata vocant, udis abiectus in herbis ad vada Maeandri concinit albus olor

Thus the white swan sings when summoned by fate, cast down among the wet grass by the shallows of the Maeander river.

63 The spectre of death still hangs in the background of this opening, given Dido’s impending suicide on Aeneas’ departure, all too well known from Virgil’s treatment of the episode in Aeneid 4. But in the context of the sufferings of love, the simile highlights the death-like pains of the unrequited lover. At the very start of this poem, the swan stands as a manifesto of Dido’s mournful, elegiac poetics.

64 Even more explicitly elegiac, however, is the depiction of the poet Arion in Ovid’s Fasti, who – after he has been captured by pirates – sings his own ‘swan song’ before escaping (Fast. 2.91–92, 105–10): Cynthia saepe tuis fertur, vocalis Arion, tamquam fraternis obstipuisse modis. (…) capit ille coronam, quae possit crines, Phoebe, decere tuos; induerat Tyrio bis tinctam murice pallam: reddidit icta suos pollice chorda sonos, flebilibus numeris veluti canentia dura traiectus penna tempora cantat olor.

Cynthia, they say, has often been stunned by your notes, tuneful Arion, just like her brother’s. (…) He took the crown which would suit your locks, Phoebus; he put on his robe, which had been dipped twice in Tyrian purple: the string, when struck, responded with its own music in a mournful rhythm, just as a swan sings when its snowy temples have been pierced by a hard arrow.

65 Arion is another archetypal poet figure: a bard of great skill, whose song possesses a power over nature akin to that of Orpheus (Fast. 2.83–90, cf. Met. 11.1–2).90 He is also equated here with Apollo, the god of poetry: the goddess Cynthia is said to have often been amazed at his song, so like her brother’s (2.91–92), while he also adorns himself like Apollo before performing to the pirates, wearing a garland that would suit Phoebus’ locks (2.106) and wearing a purple robe just like that which Apollo wears in his song contest with Pan in the Metamorphoses (Tyrio bis tinctam murice pallam, 2.107 ~ Tyrio saturata murice palla, Met. 11.166).91 Even in this opening description, however, there is a specifically elegiac aspect to his poetological representation: he is called vocalis Arion (Fast. 2.91), a phrase attested elsewhere only in Propertius when used of Adrastus’ talking horse of the same name (Prop. 2.34.37) – in a poem notably concerned with the move from epic to elegy.92 Flagged by this verbal parallel, we can also read more into the mention of Cynthia in the same line (2.91): at first sight, this noun refers to the goddess Diana, Apollo’s brother, but it also evokes the mistress of Propertius’ elegiac oeuvre, especially given the further Propertian echoes in these lines. Scholars have previously noted how Propertius aims to stun Cynthia with his verses, just as Arion does with his (nostro stupefiat Cynthia versu, Prop. 2.13.7 ~ Cynthia saepe tuis fertur … obstipuisse modis, Fast. 2.91–92);93 but we can also add the pointed echo of the incipit

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of Propertius’ Monobiblos (Cynthia prima suis, Prop. 1.1.1 ~ Cynthia saepe tuis, Fast. 2.91), signposted by the footnoting fertur.94 From the very beginning, Ovid’s Arion seems to have been cast in a particularly elegiac light.

66 This elegiac connection is reinforced further, however, in the following description of the poet’s ‘swan song’ (109–10). The phrase flebilibus numeris (109) bears a clear elegiac resonance (cf. n.7 above). But in addition, the swan explicitly sings (cantat), here with a pun on canentia in the previous line, linking the white temples of the swan with its singing – recalling the common association of poets’ white hair with the plumage of swans (cf. Trist. 4.8.1 above).95 This elegiac flavour is strengthened further by the presence of the dura penna, ‘the hard arrow’ which pierces the swan’s temples – just like the durus arator of the Georgics, an intrusion of peculiarly elegiac violence into this scene.96 But in addition to all this, the hinted subject of Arion’s song is also particularly apt for the elegiac Fasti itself: if we isolate the second half of the pentameter in verse 110 (tempora cantat olor), it is as if the swan sings of tempora (‘times/seasons’), the very subject matter of the Fasti: tempora is, after all, the very opening word of the poem.97 Arion’s song thus becomes an archetype not only of elegiac lament, but also of the elegiac Fasti, figured through the mournful death cries of the swan.98 Just like the nightingale, this bird proved a fruitful image for elegists to reflect on the nature of their own genre.

67 Yet as with the nightingale, this metaliterary association of the swan with elegiac lament is not restricted to elegy alone; it is also evoked in other genres, especially epic. In book 10 of the Aeneid, for example, the appropriately named Cycnus is transformed into a swan in grief at the death of his lover Phaethon (Aen. 10.185–93):99 Non ego te, Ligurum ductor fortissime bello, transierim, Cinyre,100 et paucis comitate Cupavo, cuius olorinae surgunt de vertice pennae (crimen, Amor, vestrum) formaeque insigne paternae. namque ferunt luctu Cycnum Phaethontis amati, populeas inter frondes umbramque sororum dum canit et maestum Musa solatur amorem, canentem molli pluma duxisse senectam linquentem terras et sidera voce sequentem.

I would not pass you by, Cinyrus, bravest leader of the Ligurians in war, nor you, Cupavo, although your retinue is small; swan plumes rise from your crest, a token of your father’s form – and a reproach, Love, to you. For they say that Cycnus, grieving for his beloved Phaethon, while singing and comforting his sad love with music amid the shade of his sisters’ poplar leaves, took on white old age with a soft plumage, leaving behind earth and chasing the stars with his cry.

68 This myth of Cycnus and Phaethon had an elegiac provenance: it was apparently treated by Phanocles in his Ἔρωτες ἢ Καλοί (fr. 6 Powell), a poem to which Virgil gestures through the combination of Amor and formae in 188, as well as the footnoting ferunt in 189. 101 Yet regardless of this literary heritage, Virgil emphasises the elegiac tenor of the episode, especially in the combination of lament and bereaved love: Virgil’s Cycnus feels grief for his beloved Phaethon (luctu … Phaethontis amati, 189) and comforts his woeful passion with song (maestum … amorem, 191).102 This elegiac combination of love and grief is reinforced, moreover, by the very names of Cycnus’ son Cupavo and his fellow commander Cinyrus. The former (Cupavo) etymologically puns on the verb cupio and its cognates such as Cupido, while its second half also suggests avis, hinting at his

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father’s avian transformation; the latter (Cinyrus), if the correct reading in the text, evokes the Greek adjective κινυρός (wailing/plaintive), which Apollonius himself had used in the Argonautica of the Heliades lamenting at Phaethon’s death (κινυρόν … γόον, Argon. 4.605).103 In addition, the elegiac flavour of the scene is further strengthened not only by the parenthetical address to Love in 188 (crimen, Amor, vestrum), evoking the harsh and reproachable god of elegy,104 but also by the description of the swan’s plumage as ‘soft’ (molli, 192), evoking yet another key term of elegiac poetry.105 Even before Ovid’s series of self-reflexive elegiac swans, therefore, Virgil had already fashioned the bird as an emblem of elegy in the Aeneid.106

69 Yet it is Ovid again who returns to this myth after Virgil and builds on its elegiac potential at the end of the Phaethon episode in the second book of the Metamorphoses (2.367–80): Adfuit huic monstro proles Stheneleia Cycnus, qui tibi materno quamvis a sanguine iunctus, mente tamen, Phaethon, propior fuit. ille relicto (nam Ligurum populos et magnas rexerat urbes) imperio ripas virides amnemque querellis Eridanum implerat silvamque sororibus auctam, cum vox est tenuata viro canaeque capillos dissimulant plumae collumque a pectore longe porrigitur digitosque ligat iunctura rubentis, penna latus velat, tenet os sine acumine rostrum. fit nova Cycnus avis nec se caeloque Iovique credit, ut iniuste missi memor ignis ab illo; stagna petit patulosque lacus ignemque perosus quae colat elegit contraria flumina flammis.

Cycnus, the son of Sthenelus, witnessed this miracle. Although he was related to you, Phaethon, by his mother’s blood, he was closer to you in affection. He abandoned his kingdom – for he had ruled over the peoples and great cities of Liguria – and filled with his weeping the Eridanus river and its green banks, as well as the wood to which his sisters had been added. And then the man’s voice grew thin, white feathers hid his hair, his neck was stretched out far from his breast, his reddening fingers were joined together by a webbed membrane, wings covered his sides, and a blunt beak replaced his mouth. So Cycnus became a strange new bird, but he did not entrust himself to the sky or to Jove, because he remembered the fiery bolt which the god had unjustly hurled; instead, he sought stagnant pools and spreading lakes and in his hatred of fire he chose to inhabit rivers, the opposite of flames.

70 Here, too, Ovid develops the elegiac tenor of the scene, alluding to the amatory relationship of Cycnus and Phaethon (368–69) and presenting Cycnus’ grief in elegiac terms: he wanders through the natural world uttering an archetypally elegiac lament (querellis, 371), with which he fills the whole landscape (querellis | … implerat, 371–72), just like the Virgilian nightingale (questibus implet, Georg. 4.515) and the Ovidian Demeter (querellis | implet, Fast. 4.481–82). The following mention of silva (372) might also bear a metapoetic resonance, as in Amores 3.1: the very raw materials of the poet’s work are suffused with elegiac mourning (querellis | … implerat silvam, 371–72). In addition to all this, however, Alison Keith has noted two further features that reinforce Cycnus’ association with elegy: first, the hero’s thinning and attenuated voice (tenuata, 373), which evokes the adjective tenuis, a key trope of not only Callimachean leptotes, but also refined elegy (cf. e.g. Elegy’s vestis tenuissima, Am. 3.1.9);107 and second, the final

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verb elēgit (Met. 2.380) which also, in a further contrametrical pun, evokes the swan’s power of specifically elegiac composition. As in Virgil, so too in Ovid, Cycnus’ transformation into a swan is framed in specifically elegiac terms.108

71 This elegiac association of the swan returns later in the Metamorphoses when another character is compared with a swan: in this case, Canens, an apparently Ovidian invention whose very name evokes poetry and song. Ovid makes this etymology explicit when she is first introduced (Met. 14.337–42): rara quidem facie, sed rarior arte canendi, unde Canens dicta est: silvas et saxa movere et mulcere feras et flumina longa morari ore suo volucresque vagas retinere solebat. quae dum feminea modulatur carmina voce, exierat tecto Laurentes Picus in agros …

72 Rare was her beauty, but rarer still her skill in singing, and hence she was called Canens. With her own voice she used to move woods and rocks, tame wild beasts, slow the course of long rivers and detain wandering birds. Once, while she was modulating her songs with her womanly voice, Picus had come out from his home into the Laurentine fields …

73 Just like Arion in Fasti 2, Canens’ song possesses a power akin to that of Orpheus (Met. 11.1–2; Fast. 2.84–90), and later in the episode, she too is compared to a swan on the point of death (Met. 14.428–34): illic cum lacrimis ipso modulata dolore verba sono tenui maerens fundebat, ut olim carmina iam moriens canit exequialia cycnus; luctibus extremum tenues liquefacta medullas tabuit inque leves paulatim evanuit auras, fama tamen signata loco est, quem rite Canentem nomine de nymphae veteres dixere Camenae.

There, in tears, she mournfully poured forth her words attuned to grief in a thin voice, just as a swan sometimes sings his funeral songs on the very point of death. Finally, as her delicate marrow dissolved in grief, she wasted away and gradually vanished into thin air. Yet her story is still imprinted on that place, which the ancient Camenae rightly called Canens after the nymph’s name.

74 Sara Myers has highlighted Canens’ close association with the ancient Latin Muses (veteres Camenae, 434) in this passage, reinforcing her role as a figure of song: the name of the Camenae, after all, was also etymologically connected with singing.109 And as Canens dies, she is presented as singing just as she did in life: her verba are modulata (428), just as she earlier modulatur (341). But despite noting the poetological associations here, Myers did not go on to consider the explicitly elegiac tones of this swan simile: once more, we find the same combination of tears and grief that we have repeatedly seen (lacrimes, dolore, maerens, luctibus), and in the use of dolor we may even detect some wordplay with olor, the original Latin word for swan. Just as with the Ovidian Cycnus, moreover, so too here Canens’ liquefaction becomes a model of elegiac tenuitas: not only does she lament with a thin sound (sono tenui, 429), but she is also transformed into soft marrow, tenues … medullas (431). Indeed, as Alex Hardie notes, the nymph’s elegiac potential is also hinted at earlier in the episode, when she is pictured wandering mad through Latian lands (Latios errat vesana per agros, 422),110 just like the maddened wandering of lovestruck elegists, such as Gallus in Virgil’s sixth Eclogue (tum

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canit, errantem Permessi ad flumina Gallum, Ecl. 6.64).111 Here too, therefore, the swan simile fashions Canens as a representative of elegiac poetry, a figure of mournful lamentation.112

75 As a final example of the elegiac potential of the swan in Roman poetry, however, let us turn to Statius’ Silvae 2.4, an epicedion for his friend Melior’s pet parrot which allusively reworks Ovid’s Amores 2.6.113 Unlike Ovid’s poem, Statius’ is in hexameters, but it still has a strong metapoetic flavour and flirts with the elegiac sphere of its intertextual model. Like Corinna’s parrot, Melior’s is figured in poetic terms: it is a tuneful creature (canorus, 2.4.9), with carefully practised words (meditataque verba, 2.4.7). And it is set within a scene suffused with the language of elegy: while alive, the bird wandered between couches like a roving elegist (errantemque toris, 2.4.6) and filled the house with shrill sounds (argutum … stridentia limina, 2.4.13), a lamenting strain which the doors now produce themselves in its absence (querelae, 2.4.14). The poet invites a whole menagerie of mourning birds to come and lament the parrot’s death (2.4.16–23, esp. gemitus, 2.4.22; miserandum … carmen, 2.4.23), a list which notably concludes with the nightingale, the ‘bereft sister who moans in her Bistonian bedchamber’ (quae Bistonio queritur soror orba cubili, 2.4.21). The elegiac bird which had opened Ovid’s epicedion (Am. 2.6.7–10: Section III) here closes Statius’ catalogue, reinforcing the poem’s elegiac underpinning. It is the swan, however, which Statius first picks out as a model and parallel for the parrot’s fate: he dismisses the ‘common tale of Phaethon’ (cedat Phaethontia vulgi | fabula, 2.4.9–10) and claims that ‘swans are not the only ones to celebrate their death’ (non soli celebrant sua funera cycni, 2.4.10). In this poem of mourning, the poet establishes the swan as a programmatic paradigm for his elegiac- inflected parrot. Here too, the swan – alongside the nightingale – is conceived as a particularly elegiac and lamentatory bird.

76 As with the nightingale, therefore, the swan proved an apt and recurring emblem of elegy. Whether introduced through a simile or through a character’s metamorphosis, the swan’s mournful and proleptic cries aptly symbolised the genre’s lamentatory aspect. It is striking, however, how much Ovid has dominated the foregoing discussion: besides the cases of Virgilian and Statian reception, every example has come from Ovid’s oeuvre. Of course, the bird briefly appears as the steed of elegy in Propertius’ programmatic 3.3 (in comparison to the war-horse of epic: 3.3.39–40, cf. n.86 above), but otherwise it does not feature in the work of other elegists, and even in this sole Propertian case we find no explicit mention of its prophetic lament. It would seem that the association of the swan’s song with impending death appealed particularly to Ovid, a poet who became so aware of his own quasi-death in exile. In addition, however, it is notable that Ovid appears to have treated the bird’s song in a grander manner than the nightingale’s, even in the genre of small-scale and personal elegy. This may again be the result of the swan’s broader associations with death, Apollo and prophecy – topics which made it appeal also to grander genres such as lyric and the paean.114 But we might also identify a further gendered dimension: in comparison to the feminine nightingale (ἀηδών, Procne, Philomela), the swan was conceived as a masculine bird (κύκνος, olor); its use as a poetic emblem did not carry the same emasculating undertones. Both birds thus symbolised the elegiac genre, but with some significant distinctions between them.

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V. The Aesthetics of Lament

77 In the previous sections, we have seen both the swan and the nightingale figured as tropes of elegiac lamentation, repeatedly appearing as models for the elegiac genre. As we have noted, this association must be indebted to the legends attached to both birds, which rendered them ready symbols of lament and mourning. The nightingale’s grief for her dead son and the swan’s for its own impending death map readily onto the flebilis and miserabilis nature of Elegy. I would like to conclude, however, by asking whether there is anything more in the nature and aesthetic of these birds’ laments, as represented in ancient literature and thought, that made them particularly appropriate as a symbol of elegy.

78 Ovid’s description of the swan’s thinned voice certainly points in this direction, connecting the bird with elegiac tenuitas. The bird was associated with a thin, small sound elsewhere: Lucretius twice talks of the swan’s parvus canor (‘small song’, 4.181 = 910), apparently in imitation of Antipater of Sidon’s description of Erinna as possessing the ‘small sound of the swan’ (κύκνου μικρὸς θρόος, AP 7.713.7 = HE 58.7 [566]). By tapping into this tradition, Ovid makes the bird’s song an apt figure for the small and thin style of his elegy (cf. exiguos elegos, Ars P. 77; tenuissima, Am. 3.1.9).115

79 In more general terms, however, the nature of both birds’ song also seems to be particularly well-matched for the sonic aspect of elegy and lament. Their singing is often associated in Greek with the adjectives λίγυς and λιγυρός, evoking a shrill and clear quality. We noted above Democritus’ specification of the swan and nightingale as the λιγυροί in imitation of whom mankind learnt to sing (Section II above), and both birds are repeatedly qualified with this adjective elsewhere: in Aristophanes’ Birds, Cinesias asks to become a λιγύφθογγος ἀηδών (‘shrill-voiced nightingale’, Ar. Av.1380); in tragedy, the nightingale is λίγεια (‘shrill’, Aesch. Ag. 1146; Soph. OC 671); and in the 21st Homeric Hymn, the swan sings λίγα (‘shrilly’, h. Hom. 21.1). Even the name of Cycnus’ native people, the Ligurians, seems to hint at the connection etymologically (Ligurum, Aen. 10.185; Met. 2.370).116

80 It is significant, then, that these same words are also often associated with grief and mourning. According to the LSJ, λίγυς after Hesiod is used ‘mostly of sad sounds.’ We could cite, for example, the Linus mourning song (of uncertain date) which employs shrill voices (φωναῖς λιγυραῖς, 880 PMG), and was said to be sung in an attenuated voice (μετ’ ἰσχνοφωνίας), like an Ovidian swan (b schol. Il. 18.570):117 φασὶ δὲ αὐτὸν (sc. τὸν Λίνον) ἐν Θήβαις ταφῆναι καὶ τιμηθῆναι θρηνώδεσιν ᾠδαῖς ἃς λινῳδίας ἐκάλεσαν. ἔστι δὲ μέλος θρηνητικὸν ὁ λίνος μετ’ ἰσχνοφωνίας ᾀδόμενος. ἆρα οὖν ὁ νεανίας διὰ τῆς μιμήσεως ταύτης τὰ κατὰ τὸν Λίνον ᾖδεν; ἐθρηνεῖτο γὰρ οὗτος παρὰ τῶν Μουσῶν οὕτως· †ὦ Λίνε θεοῖσι τετιμημένε, σοὶ γὰρ πρώτῳ μέλος ἔδωκαν ἀθάνατοι ἀνθρώποισι φωναῖς λιγυραῖς ἀεῖσαι· Φοῖβος δέ σε κότῳ ἀναιρεῖ, Μοῦσαι δέ σε θρηνέουσιν.† They say that he (sc. Linus) was buried in Thebes and honoured in mourning songs which they called Linus-songs. The Linus is a mourning song which is sung in a thin voice. Was the youth in this representation singing the song about Linus? He was mourned by the Muses as follows: Oh Linus, honoured by the gods – for the immortals first gave you a song for men to sing with a shrill voice; Phoebus killed you in anger, but the Muses mourn for you.

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81 The adverb λίγεως is also often used of lament, as of the Heliades in the Argonautica (again in the context of Phaethon’s death: γόον ὀξὺν ὀδυρομένων ἐσάκουον, | Ἡλιάδων λιγέως· τὰ δὲ δάκρυα μυρομένῃσιν, Argon. 4.624–25) and of lynxes mourning for their lost young in the pseudo-Oppianic Cynegetica (μύρονται λίγεως ἀδινὸν γόον ἐκ δ᾿ ἄρα τηλοῦ | κωκυτὸν προϊᾶσι πολύστονον, Cyn. 3.103–4). Moreover, as Frederick Ahl has noted, already in Homer the adverb is frequently used in contexts of lamentation.118 A λίγυς voice, therefore, often reflects the sounds of mourning. The repeated use of this language for the nightingale and swan implies that their cries are particularly appropriate for lament. And we could also compare the adjectives liquidus and argutus in Latin, which are similarly used of both bird song and lamentation.119 In both Greek and Latin, therefore, the very sound of the nightingale’s and swan’s singing aligned them closely with the world of grief and mourning.

82 Even more intriguingly, however, this same sonic quality was also associated with elegy. A λιγυρῶς manner is precisely what the Hellenistic grammarian Dionysius Thrax prescribes for the reading of elegy itself (Dion. Thrax Ars, GG I.1, p. 6.8–11): ἵνα τὴν μὲν τραγῳδίαν ἡρωϊκῶς ἀναγνώμεν, τὴν δὲ κωμῳδίαν βιωτικῶς, τὰ δὲ ἐλεγεῖα λιγυρῶς, τὸ δὲ ἔπος εὐτόνως, τὴν δὲ λυρικὴν ποίησιν ἐμμελῶς, τοὺς δὲ οἴκτους ὑφειμένως καὶ γοερῶς.

So that we read tragedy heroically, comedy in a lifelike manner, elegy shrilly, epic vigorously, lyric poetry harmoniously, and lament in a subdued and plaintive tone.

83 Dionysius distinguishes ‘elegy’ and ‘lament’ here, indicating that the two were never seen as identical. Yet his choice of the adverb λιγυρῶς for elegiac performance is still revealing. In fact, the scholia’s gloss on this detail highlights the continuing association of the genre (and its sound) with grief and sorrow (Scholia Vaticana, GG I.3, p. 173.15–17): «Λιγυρῶς» δέ, οἷον ὀξέως ἀναγινώσκειν ἡμᾶς δεῖ τὰ ἐλεγεῖα, ὡς ἂν συμπεπνιγμένους καὶ ἐκπεπληγμένους τῷ πλήθει τῶν κακῶν.

‘shrilly’, because we must read elegy sharply, as though choked and beaten down by the multitude of evils.120

84 For this second century Hellenistic critic, a shrill quality was particularly appropriate for the mournful strains of elegy, a sentiment which seems to reflect broader Hellenistic thought: Phanocles hints at the same association through his repeated use of the adjectives λίγυς/λιγυρός in treating the death of Orpheus in his Ἔρωτες ἢ Καλοί (fr. 1 Powell).121 And it is likely that this association dates back even further than the Hellenistic age. In Theognis’ famous premonition of his addressee Cyrnus’ enduring fame, the poet pictures the boy as the subject of specifically ‘shrill’ music (Thgn. 239– 43): θοίνῃς δὲ καὶ εἰλαπίνῃσι παρέσσῃ ἐν πάσαις, πολλῶν κείμενος ἐν στόμασιν, καί σε σὺν αὐλίσκοισι λιγυφθόγγοις νέοι ἄνδρες εὐκόσμως ἐρατοὶ καλά τε καὶ λιγέα ᾄσονται.

You will be present at every dinner and feast, lying on the lips of many, and lovely youths accompanied by shrill-sounding pipes will sing of you in orderly, beautiful and shrill voices.

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85 Theognis imagines the reception of his elegiac poetry within a sympotic setting, sung in a shrill style (λιγέα, 42) to the accompaniment of ‘shrill-sounding’ pipes (σὺν αὐλίσκοισι λιγυφθόγγοις, 41). The aulos, the instrument to which elegy was often performed, is explicitly figured as λίγυς.122 Like Dionysius Thrax, Theognis thus already associates elegy and its sounds with this aesthetic mode. And it is notable that here too we are close to the world of lament: in the following lines, Theognis pictures Cyrnus’ future departure to ‘Hades’ house of much wailing, beneath the depths of the dark earth’ (δνοφερῆς ὑπὸ κεύθεσι γαίης | βῇς πολυκωκύτους εἰς Ἀΐδαο δόμους, Thgn. 243– 44) in language that recalls the Iliadic lament of Andromache upon Hector’s death (νῦν δὲ σὺ μὲν Ἀΐδαο δόμους ὑπὸ κεύθεσι γαίης | ἔρχεαι, Il. 22.482–83).123 Already in the sixth century, we thus find λιγυρότης encoded into elegy’s own self-identity. 86 The connection is also suggested by Solon’s alias for his fellow elegiac poet Mimnermus (Λιγυᾳστάδης, Solon fr. 20 W2). As critics in antiquity recognised, this name (like Cycnus’ ‘Ligurians’) evokes the adjective λίγυς; indeed, the Suda claims that the name derives precisely from the ‘melodious’ and ‘shrill’ aspect of Mimnermus’ poetry (ἐκαλεῖτο δὲ καὶ Λιγυαστάδης διὰ τὸ ἐμμελὲς καὶ λιγύ, Suda s.v. Μίμνερμος, μ 1077). 124 If such an etymology underlies Solon’s naming of Mimnermus in the sixth century BCE, the connotations of the word must have had a long history. A λίγυς aesthetic, therefore, is the appropriate mode of not only lament, but also elegy. The shrill song of the swan and nightingale was perfectly attuned to both spheres.

87 Besides this shrill lamentatory quality, however, both birds’ cries were also regularly associated with sweetness, another quality that resonates strongly with the elegiac aesthetic.125 According to Isidorus, the swan pours forth a sweet song (Isid. Orig. 12.7.18): olor avis est quem Graeci κύκνον appellant … cycnus autem a canendo est appellatus, eo quod carminis dulcedinem modulatis vocibus fundit. ideo autem suaviter eum canere, quia collum longum et inflexum habet, et necesse est eluctantem vocem per longum et flexuosum iter varias reddere modulationes.

The swan is a bird which the Greeks call κύκνος … Moreover, the swan is named from its singing, because it pours out sweet song with modulated sounds. It is said to sing so sweetly because it has a long and curved neck, and the voice, forcing its way through the long and winding route, necessarily utters varied modulations.

88 The phrase modulatis vocibus may recall for us the Ovidian language of Canens in Met. 14, who similarly modulatur with modulata verba, but what we should stress here is the emphasis on the dulcis nature of the bird’s song, an emphasis we also find elsewhere. Lucretius introduces the short song of the swan as a parallel for his own few but sweet- voiced verses,126 while we have already encountered birds that complain ‘sweetly’ in Ovid’s Amores 3.1 and Heroides 15 (dulce queruntur aves). The association is even already found in Attic drama: in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Cassandra envies the ‘sweet life’ that the nightingale has received from the gods, in comparison to her own lot (γλυκύν τ’αἰῶνα, Ag. 1148), while in Aristophanes’ Birds, the nightingale sings sweetly in symphony with the Muses (τὴν δ᾿ ἡδυμελῆ ξύμφωνον ἀηδόνα Μούσαις, Av. 659). Both birds were thus well known for their sweet and pleasant sounds.

89 As with their shrill song, this recurring emphasis on the birds’ sweetness also resonates with key elegiac programmatics: dulcis is a familiar programmatic word in Roman elegy, and Callimachus famously describes Mimnermus as ‘sweet’ in his Aetia prologue (

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γλυκύς, fr. 1.11 Harder). But we could also cite Hermesianax’s earlier description of Mimnermus in the Leontion (fr. 7.35–37 Powell = fr. 3.35–37 Lightfoot): Μίμνερμος δὲ, τὸν ἡδὺν ὃς εὕρετο πολλὸν ἀνατλὰς ἦχον καὶ μαλακοῦ πνεῦμ᾿ ἀπὸ πενταμέτρου, καίετο μὲν Ναννοῦς·

Long-suffering Mimnermus, who discovered sweet song and the soft pentamenter’s breath, burned for Nanno. 90 Hermesianax conceives of Mimnermus as the πρῶτος εὑρετής of the elegiac genre (εὕρετο, 35), taking a clear stance in the ancient debate on this question.127 What is most significant for us here, however, is the emphasis on Mimnermus’ sweet song ( ἡδύν … ἦχον) and the softness of the pentameter ( μαλακοῦ … πενταμέτρου), foreshadowing not only Callimachus’ praise, but also the Roman conception of mollitia. Elegy is a programmatically sweet and soft genre, and in this regard the swan and the nightingale are again ideal models for its acoustics. Of course, sweetness is a rather impressionistic term, and in antiquity it could be applied to a whole range of poets, not only Lucretius but even Homer, the archetypal epic poet.128 Yet since sweetness was a key concept with which elegiac poets themselves played, the overlap of birdsong and elegiac aesthetic is certainly suggestive.129

91 Indeed, in this regard, we should close by recalling the mention of ‘sweeter nightingales’ in the famous Aetia prologue of Callimachus ( ἀ̣η̣[δονίδες] δ̣’ ὧδε μελιχρ[ό]τεραι, Aet. fr. 1.16 Harder), a phrase which certainly seems to gain added significance from the foregoing discussion. There may be something more specifically elegiac about this combination of nightingales and sweetness than is often thought. Moreover, the later praise of the cicada’s λιγὺς ἦχος (fr. 1.29 Harder), the apparent mention of a dying swan in the fragmentary close of the prologue (fr. 1.39–40 Harder), and the possible mention of a λίγεια Μοῦσα (fr. 2a.2 Harder) in the transition to the Somnium all combine to suggest that the opening of Callimachus’ poem offers the ideal embodiment of the various tropes that we have been exploring above.130 In this key work of elegiac poetry (cf. ἐλέγοισι, Aet. fr. 7.13 Harder), so influential for later Roman poets, we already find the nightingale and swan associated with a sweet and shrill poetics, foreshadowing later Roman elegists’ treatment of these birds.

VI. Epilogue

92 In their sweetness, shrillness and lamentation, therefore, the swan and the nightingale proved ideal figures for the elegiac poet and his sweet yet sombre aesthetic. As we have seen, Hellenistic and Roman poets repeatedly returned to both birds as emblems for elegiac poetry, not just because of their mournful myths, but also because of the very nature of their song, which was both shrill and sweet – just like elegy. Of course, neither bird ever became an exclusively elegiac emblem, and both continued to be employed as ‘songbirds’ more generally. But the elegiac affinity of the birds’ myths and song ensured that they both became a recurring and dominant emblem of the genre.

93 To close, I would like to suggest one direction in which this research could be expanded, by exploring further aspects of antiquity’s generic bestiary. The swan and the nightingale were just one part of a broader tradition of employing animals as emblems for different genres. Besides the swan and the nightingale, we could identify

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other animals which more occasionally evoke the elegiac genre, such as the Callimachean cicada (see above on Aet. fr. 1.29 Harder) or the halcyon, a figure with a similarly mournful myth who appears alongside Procne in Propertius’ poem on Cynthia’s birthday (3.10.9–10) and the programmatic Tristia 5.1 (hoc querulam Procnen Halcyonenque facit, Trist. 5.1.60). But we could also examine the symbolic animals of other genres. The horse was strongly associated with epic, for example, while iambos featured a wide cast of programmatically bristly critters: as Mario Telò has recently demonstrated, the donkey (Archil. fr. 21 W2), fox (Archil. fr. 185–87 W2) and hedgehog (Archil. fr. 201 W2) aptly convey the aesthetic horror of iambos and its association with shaggy roughness (τραχύτης, δασύτης).131 In these other cases, however, the sound of these beasts is less prominent: the horse’s epic associations reside primarily in its familiar role on the battlefield, while the creatures of iambos signify through their bristling physicality. The swan and nightingale, by contrast, symbolise elegy as much through the aesthetics of their song, as through their thematic or corporeal associations. They encapsulate the sound, as much as the feel, of the genre.

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NOTES

1. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at a seminar on ‘Elegy’ in Cambridge in 2017 (organised by Stephen Oakley) and as part of the panel ‘Song, Lament, Love: Harking Back to the Sounds of Elegy’ at the 12th Celtic Conference in Classics (Coimbra) in 2019 (organised by Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides, Bill Gladhill and Micah Myers). I would like to thank the organisers for their support and assistance, and the participants of both events for useful feedback. I also owe special thanks to Talitha Kearey and two anonymous reviewers for generous comments on earlier written versions, and I am grateful to the editors of Dictynna for their help and encouragement. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 2. On L’Allegro and Il Penseroso as a poetic pair, see e.g. Lewalski (2003) 5–7; Teskey (2011) 75–88, (2015) 76–100. 3. The amatory aspect of elegy is frequently foregrounded in modern ‘marketing’ of the genre: many Universities offer courses on ‘Roman/Latin love elegy’, and two recent companions focus specifically on this aspect: Gold (2012); Thorsen (2013). 4. On elegy’s varied generic background, see Hunter (2013). This is not to deny that some Greek poets could construct their own selective elegiac literary histories: in the Hellenistic period, Hermesianax’s Leontion transforms elegy (and many other literary genres) into a discourse centred solely on love and loss (fr. 7 Powell = fr. 3 Lightfoot): Spatafora (2004); Farrell (2012) 14– 17. 5. For catalogues of ancient attestations of these etymologies, see Kannicht (1969) II. 73; Maltby (1991) 201–2 s.vv. elegeus, elegia, elegiacus; O’Hara (2017) xvii, xxi–xxii nn. 3, 4. For discussion, see Harvey (1955) 170–1; Rosenmeyer (1968); West (1974) 1–21; Bowie (1986) 22–27; Hinds (1987a) 103–4; Alexiou (2002) 104–6; Bessone (2003) 215–25; Nagy (2010); O’Hara (2018); Swift (2019) 14– 17. 6. Of course, Horace is not the most disinterested critic; by claiming love for lyric, he aggrandises his own characteristic poetic form. Alternatively, some scholars interpret verse 76 as a reference to love elegy, taking the vota as the wishes of the lover and voti sententia compos as ‘the expression of one’s gratified wish/desire’ (cf. e.g. Ov. Ars Am. 1.485–86): see e.g. Clark (1983), countering the criticisms of Brink (1971) 166–67. Even if this reading were right, however, love poetry still proves secondary (post) to the original querimonia (primum). 7. E.g. Hor. Carm. 1.33.2–3 (miserabilis … elegos), 2.9.9 (flebilibus modis); Ov. Am. 3.9.3 (flebilis … Elegia; ex vero in v. 4 signposts the etymology: Ziogas (2013) 330 n.17), Her. 15.7 (flebile carmen), Trist. 5.1.5 (flebile carmen). Cf. too Isid. Orig. 1.39.14; Varro, De Poematis (GRF fr. 303): nam et elegia extrema mortuo accinebatur sicuti nenia, ideoque ab eadem elogium videtur tractum cognominari, quod mortuis vel morituris ascribitur novissimum (‘for an elegy, like a dirge, is sung at the last to the dead; and therefore the word elogium [“epitaph”] seems to have been derived from the same root, because it is written at the last for the dead or those about to die’, tr. Keith (1992) 142 n.16). 8. Tr. adapted from Hunter (2006a) 121 n.8. Cf. e.g. Ov. Am. 1.1.17–18, 27 on the rise and fall of the elegiac couplet. For further discussion (both ancient and modern) of the relationship between the hexameter and pentameter, see Morgan (2012). 9. Sapphic stanza: e.g. Dion. Hal. Comp. 19.131, II.85.12–18 Usener–Radermacher (μικράς … στροϕάς, ὀλίγοις … κώλοις); Morgan (2010) 181–283, esp. 212–18. Sotadean: e.g. Demetr. Eloc. 189

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(ὁποια̑ γὰρ μεταμεμορϕωμένῳ ἔοικεν ὁ στίχος, ὥσπερ οἱ μυθευόμενοι ἐξ ἀρρένων μεταβάλλειν εἰς θηλείας, ‘for the line seems as if it has metamorphosed, like figures in myth who change from males into females’); Morgan (2010) 44–45. Cf. too Morgan (2010) 115–130 on choliambics, a deformed version of the iambic trimeter, characterised as limping and brutish (e.g. Demetr. Eloc. 301). I thank Llewelyn Morgan for discussion on this point. 10. Bowie (1986) 25; note especially Andromache’s elegiac lament at Andr. 103–16. However, Bowie may go too far in ruling out the existence of elegiac threnodies in the archaic period: Aloni (2001) 91. 11. Simonides was celebrated for his funereal poetry (Catull. 38.8; Hor. Carm. 2.1.37–38; Dion. Hal. De imit. 2.2.6 (420), II.205.7–11 Usener–Radermacher; Quint. Inst. 10.1.64) and had many epitaphic epigrams ascribed to his name (Page (1981) 186–302). Most evidence for his threnodies concerns lyric metres (520–31 PMG), but his Plataea Elegy commemorates the war-dead (fr. 11 W2: Nobili (2011)) and fr. 22 W2 may also be an elegiac threnody: Yatromanolakis (1998). 12. See esp. SEG 41.540A, a sixth-century elegiac epitaph from a polyandrion in Ambracia, concerned with mourning (ὀλοφύρομαι, v. 1) and grief (πένθος, v. 6): Bousquet (1992) 586–606; D’Alessio (1995); Estrin (2019). Prior to the sixth century, the hexameter dominated verse inscriptions. 13. [στο]νόεσσα, ‘mournful’ or [ἀλγι]νόεσσα, ‘grievous’, fr. 9.5 W 2: Swift (2019) 220; κλαίων, ‘weeping’, fr. 11.1 W2; cf. Plut. quomodo aud. poet. 6.23b (θρηνῶν, ‘lamenting’), 12.33a–b (λυπούμενος, ‘aggrieved’). 14. Cf. Hunter (2013) 29. We could also cite Antimachus’ Lyde (c. 400 BCE), an elegiac poem apparently composed to console himself on the loss of his wife/mistress: Matthews (1996) 27. 15. Cf. Saylor (1967); Kennedy (1993) 32 (‘the verb “to bewail” (queri) becomes discursively constructed to signify the act of writing elegy’); James (2003) 108–28. See e.g. Tib. 1.2.9, 1.4.71, 1.8.53; Prop. 1.16.39, 1.18.29; Ov. Am. 2.4.27, 2.6.7–8. Cf. Hor. Carm. 2.9, addressed to the elegiac poet Valgius: Valgius, he claims, never ceases from pursuing his lover Mystes with tearful verses (flebilibus modis, 2.9.9–10) and should cease from his ‘soft complaints’ (desine mollium | tandem querelarum, 2.9.17–18). 16. See e.g. Papanghelis (1987); Ramsby (2007); Keith (2011). 17. Metrical form: Morgan (2010) 345–77, (2012); Henkel (2014). Callimachean heritage: Hunter (2006b), (2012) 162–70. Elegy and epic: Hinds (1987a). Generally, see too Kennedy (1993); Keith (1999a). 18. For a useful catalogue of metapoetic birds, see Nünlist (1998) 39–54. Cf. too Steiner (2007); Gurd (2016) 36–38, 42–50; Roussel (forthcoming a). 19. The closest other reference is Od. 21.411, when the bowstring ‘sings like a swallow in tone’ (ἡ δ᾿ ὑπὸ καλὸν ἄεισε, χελιδόνι εἰκέλη αὐδήν). Otherwise, the verb is only used of the Muses and internal characters, especially bards. For the significance of this simile, see Anhalt (2001); Alden (2017) 132–37. 20. Rank (1951) 35. See Et. Gud. s.v. ἀηδών (I 29.19–20 De Stefani): παρὰ τὸ ἀείδω ἀηδών κατὰ διάλεκτον Αἰολέων. 21. Nagy (1996) 59–86, who also sees this variation exemplified by a textual variant for this adjective: πολυδευκέα, glossed as τὴν ποικίλως μεμιμημένην (‘variously imitative’, Ael. NA 5.38). 22. West (1978) 206; Steiner (2007) 179, 181; Canevaro (2015) 56. 23. Cf. Puelma (1972) 90 n.22; Pucci (1977) 77 n.5; Steiner (2007) 180–81, comparing Ar. Av. 213– 14, Eur. Hel. 1111–13 for the conjunction of the nightingale’s neck and song. 24. Schol. Op. 202a (p. 75 Pertusi): καλῶς οὖν ἑαυτὸν ἀηδόνι ἀπῄκασε – μουσικὸν γὰρ τὸ ὄρνεον. Cf. Pucci (1977) 62; Steiner (2007) 178–88, (2012) 3–11 (detecting a poetic agon between the Homeric hawk and Hesiodic nightingale; cf. already Hubbard (1995)); Lye (2018) 180 (further noting the gendered power hierarchy between the masculine ἴρηξ and feminine ἀηδών).

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25. The date of this hymn is unknown, but it is generally dated between the late-sixth and mid- fifth centuries BCE: Janko (1982) 184–85; Fröhder (1994) 304–5; Thomas (2011) 169–70. Contrast Andrisano (1978–1979) (fifth to fourth centuries BCE). 26. Note esp. ἔαρος … πετάλοισιν … ἐπιπροχέουσα χέει μελίγηρυν ἀοιδήν, h. Hom. 19.17–18 ~ ἔαρος … πετάλοισι … τρωπῶσα χέει πολυηχέα φωνήν, Od. 19.519–21. See Germany (2005) 199–202; Thomas (2011) 168–69. 27. Cf. Maehler (2004) 100. 28. The nightingale dwells among ‘wine-faced ivy’ (οἰνωπόν … κισσόν, 674–75) where ‘Dionysus always treads’ (ἀεὶ Διόνυσος ἐμβατεύει, 679): Suksi (2001) esp. 655–57. 29. Cf. Scodel (1980) 51 with n.16, who notes that Palamedes is called an ‘epic poet’ (ἐποποιός) in the Suda (π 44). Cf. too Eur. HF 1021–22, where the chorus seem to mention Procne’s murder of her only child (for which she would be transformed into a nightingale) as a subject of song to be sacrificed to the Muses (μονότεκνον Πρόκνης φόνον ἔχω λέξαι | θυόμενον Μούσαις): for the uncertain meaning of these verses, see Bond (1981) 327; Monella (2005) 232 n.28. 30. For further discussion and examples, see Thompson (1936) 17–18; Monella (2005) 221–51; Mathieu-Castellani (2016) 15–86; Roussel (forthcoming b). 31. See Donohue (1993) 18–33 and Thévenaz (forthcoming) for a fuller survey. 32. See Et. Gud. s.v. ἀηδών (I 29.19 De Stefani): διὰ τὸ ἀεὶ ᾄδειν ἐν θέρει καὶ ἐν χειμῶνι. Part of v. 1 (κύκνος ὑπὸ πτερύγων) was attributed to various other poets in antiquity, including Alcman (S2 SLG), Terpander (S6 SLG) and Ion (S316 SLG). 33. Alcman: Hutchinson (2001) 100–2. Pratinas: Wright (2016) 15–16. 34. Given both birds’ association with mourning (see below), it may not be a coincidence that their metamorphoses are first described as a pitiful (ἐλεινήν) sight. 35. Tr. adapted from Grube and Reeve (1992) 290–91. 36. See Schwinge (1965); Thévenaz (2002); Pianezzola (2011); Harrison (2017) 235–44. 37. See Bettini (2008) 43–47, 118–22. 38. Cf. too Plut. De soll. an. 19.973a on poets ‘comparing their sweetest poems to the songs of swans and the odes of nightingales’ (τὰ ἥδιστα ποιήματα μέλεσι κύκνων καὶ ἀηδόνων ᾠδαῖς ἀπεικάζοντες). 39. Tr. adapted from Laks and Most (2016) VII 247. 40. This section builds on the important study of Monella (2005) 221–51, adding futher examples and discussion, as well as exploring the significant Hellenistic precedent which he does not consider. 41. For the bird’s association with lament, cf. too [Mosch.] Lament for Bion 38, 46–49; Nicaenetus fr. 1.9–10 Powell; Parthenius fr. 33.2–3 Lightfoot with Lightfoot (1999) 188–89. 42. For the myth and its reception, see e.g. Gildenhard and Zissos (2007). 43. Cf. Alden (2017) 132–37. 44. See e.g. Van Dam (1984) 355–56; Booth (1991) 125; McKeown (1998) 114–15; Woodman (2012) 143. The same ambiguity is reflected in a fragmentary hypothesis for Sophocles’ Tereus: ἐγέ[νοντο ἡ μὲν] ἀηδὼν ἡ δε χε̣[λιδών], ‘one became a nightingale, the other a swallow’ ( P.Oxy. 3013.31–32). The alternative tradition has a long afterlife: cf. Milton’s ‘Philomel’ with which we began. 45. Aesch. Ag. 1142–45 (~ Cassandra), Suppl. 58–76 (~ female chorus); Soph. Aj. 622–33 (~ Ajax’s mother), El. 103–9, 147–49, 1075–77 (~ Electra), Trach. 962–63 (~ female chorus); Eur. Hec. 337–38 (~ Polyxena), Hel. 1107–16 (~ female chorus), Phaethon fr. 773.19–26 TrGF. Cf. too Sophocles’ Tereus: Coo (2013), Finglass (2016). On the nightingale in tragedy, cf. Weiss (2017) 253–63, (2018) 144–67. 46. Cf. Hunter (1992a). Ἀηδόνες as titular: Williams (1991) 171. For ‘nightingales’ as poems, cf. Ἀλκμᾶνος ἀηδόνες (adesp. AP 9.184.9); Hsch. α 1498: ἀηδόνα· ὠιδήν; Callim. Aet. fr. 1.16 Harder (see Section V below).

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47. Cf. Hunter (1992b) 20. For οἶτον, cf. Nicaenetus fr.1.9 Powell (ὀλολυγόνος οἶτον) and Eur. IT 1091 where, if the MS is to be trusted, the halcyon sings an ἔλεγον οἶτον. 48. Cf. Hunter (1992b) 22, acknowledging debt to Charles Segal. 49. E.g. Heath (1988) 81–84; Ambühl (2005) 366, 410–11. The nature of Callimachus’ (and Hesiod’s) initiation in the fragmentary Somnium of the Aetia is much debated, but on the basis of later receptions it is plausible that both were depicted as drinking the water of Hippocrene. For various viewpoints, see Crowther (1979); Knox (1985); Sens (2015) 47. 50. Callimachus’ Aetia may conceal a third Callimachean association of the nightingale with elegiac lament. Fr. 113 Harder = fr. 63 Massimilla appears to treat the myth of Scylla, transformed into the bird Ciris after betraying her father and country. Verse 2 may conceal a reference to the myth of Procne and Philomela (Δαυ[λιάδες], conjectured by Pfeiffer), suggesting that Callimachus may have compared Scylla’s transformation with their metamorphosis into the nightingale and swallow (cf. [Virg.] Ciris 200 Dauliades, 410 Procne). See Massimilla (1996) 374; Harder (2012) II 872. The evidence is inconclusive, but we may speculate whether Callimachus also alluded to the lamentatory aspect of the nightingale here. Cf. Scylla’s elegiac-style lament at Ov. Met. 8.44–80, and the elegiac aspects of the pseudo-Virgilian Ciris: see Kayachev (2016) 21–26 (reworking of major Catullan elegies), 114–15 (quasi-elegiac laments). 51. Cf. Lloyd-Jones (1963) 96; Barigazzi (1968) 201–2; Gutzwiller (1998) 154. For its length, cf. Meleager AP 4.1 (58 verses), Philip AP 4.2 (14 verses), Callimachus Epigr. 1 Pf. = AP 7.89 (16 verses), although the unusual length of the first two may also reflect their status as lists. 52. Cf. Lloyd-Jones (1963) 87–88. This wish taps into Archilochus’ budding Hellenistic hero cult: cf. the Mnesiepes inscription from the mid-third century BCE, SEG 15.517 and see Clay (2004), with 30–32 on Posidippus. 53. Lloyd-Jones (1963) 91–92. 54. Cf. Hunter (2011) 235–36. 55. See Didym. Περὶ ποιητῶν (p. 387 Schmidt), apud Orion. gramm. etym. s.v. ἔλεγος (p. 58 Sturz): εὑρετὴν δὲ τοῦ ἐλεγείου <φασὶν> οἱ μὲν τὸν Ἀρχίλοχον, οἱ δὲ Μίμνερμον, οἱ δὲ Καλλῖνον παλαιότερον. For the debate, cf. Ars P. 77–78 (Section I above) and the further testimonies collected by De Stefani (1909–1920) II 451–52. 56. Lloyd-Jones (1963) 91. The poet’s specification of his own φίλον στόμα (‘dear/kind mouth’) may also implicitly contrast Archilochus’ famously venomous mouth (cf. Callim. fr. 380 Pf.): Tsantsanoglou (2013) 129. Posidippus’ rejection of tears also looks to the poem’s closing wish for a happy afterlife through mystic initiation (108.24–28): Dickie (1998) 70–76. 57. Cf. Thorsen (2014) 55, citing Syndikus (1984–1990) II 197; Quinn (1996) 353. See too Woodman (2012) 141–43 on Catullus’ allusions to the alternative versions of the nightingale myth. 58. Barchiesi (1993) 364; Bessone (2013) 45–46. This etymologising is assisted by reading canam in 12, but can still be felt in the combination of semper (12) and concinit (13) if one prefers to follow the other manuscript reading (tegam) or other conjectures (seram: Ellis (1904) ad loc.; legam: Santini (1994)). Verses 11–12 also emblematise two of the major strands of elegy: love and lament. 59. The division of Catullus’ corpus continues to be a matter of debate (see Skinner (2007) for an overview), but on Catull. 65–116 as a collection (framed by Callimachean references: carmina Battiadae, 65.16 ~ 116.2), see Wiseman (1969) 17–18, (1979) 176–79 where he accepts the thesis of Quinn (1972) 264–65; Forsyth (1977) 353; Hutchinson (2003); Skinner (2003); Hubbard (2005) 269– 75. On the programmatic and transitional nature of Carm. 65, see Block (1984). 60. For further Callimachean echoes in this poem, see Barchiesi (1993) 363–65 and Hunter (1993); and for the Callimachean character of Carm. 65–116 as a whole, see King (1988). 61. Cf. Ibyc. 303b PMG: ἆμος ἄυπνος κλυτὸς ὄρθρος ἐγείρησιν ἀηδόνας (ἀύπνους … ἀηδόνας, coni. Schneidewin). Sleeplessness is another apt emblem of elegy, given its original association

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with lovesickness: Thomas (1979) 195–205; cf. Phanocles’ depiction of love-struck Orpheus’ ἄγρυπνοι … μελεδῶναι (fr. 1.5 Powell). 62. McKeown (1998) 116. 63. imitatrix ales: Hinds (1987b) 7, (1998) 4–5. Parrot as poet: Cahoon (1984), (1991); Boyd (1987), (1997) 170–77; Myers (1990); Thorsen (2014) 163–64; contrast Kronenberg (2016). See too Statius’ own rewrite of Ovid’s parrot poem, Silv. 2.4 (Section IV below). 64. Hinds (1987a) 120, citing Fast. 2.121 (… canimus sacras alterno carmine Nonas); Trist. 3.1.11 (alterno … versu), 3.1.56 (alternos … pedes), 3.7.10 (alternos … pedes). Cf. too Stat. Silv. 1.2.9 (alternum ... pedem). 65. Cf. Karakasis (2010). 66. Cf. Hunter (2006b) 30, suggesting a connection with Callimachus’ untrodden paths. For silva as raw poetic material, see Hinds (1998) 12–13. Cf. too the opening of Prop. 3.1 (a likely intertext for Ovid given its identical book position), which combines Greek tradition and Italian originality in a similarly programmatic manner. 67. queruntur aves is a recurring leitmotif of Ovidian elegy: cf. too Her. 10.8, Fast. 4.166. 68. Thus Hunter (2006b) 30. See esp. Cat. 65.13 (sub densis ramorum … umbris) and Virg. Georg. 4.511 (populea … sub umbra – below). Cf. too Od. 19.520 (δενδρέων ἐν πετάλοισι … πυκινοῖσιν); h. Hom. 19.17 (ἐν πετάλοισι); Soph. OC 673 (χλωραῖς ὑπὸ βάσσαις); Eur. Phaethon fr. 773.23 TrGF (ἐν δένδρεσι); Theoc. Id. 7.140 (ἐν πυκιναῖσι βάτων … ἀκάνθαις [if ὀλολυγών refers to a nightingale and not a frog: Hunter (1999) 194]); Parthenius fr. 33.2 Lightfoot (ἐνὶ βήσσῃς); [Mosch.] Lament for Bion 9 (πυκινοῖσιν … ποτὶ φύλλοις). 69. Cf. Monella (2005) 243. 70. On the debated authorship of Heroides 15, see Thorsen (2014) 96–122. 71. Cf. Rosati (1996) 214–15 n.36; Hallett (2005) para. 21–28. 72. For genealogical relationships as a marker of allusion, see e.g. Sommerstein (1987) 215 and Wright (2016) 99–100 on Ar. Av. 281–83 (~ Sophocles’ Tereus); Hunter (2014) 138–39 on Thgn. 1135–50 (~ Op. 200); and the further examples amassed at Currie (2016) 27 n.169. I make this point here without committing to the directionality of this allusion: the move from Tereus in Am. 2.6 to Itys in Her. 15 could suggest that the epistle is the later poem, but Ovid is perfectly capable of inverting the usual genealogical flow, starting with son (Her. 15) and moving back to father (Am. 2.6). 73. Thorsen (2014) 166–67. The adjective appears only once more in Ovid’s corpus, at Am. 3.9.21– 22 (the epicedion for Tibullus): see Thorsen (2014) 166–70 for the intertextual network. 74. Thorsen (2014) 165–66, who further notes (pp. 52–56) the echoes of Am. 3.12.32 (concinit Odrysium Cecropis ales Ityn) and of Homer’s Penelopean nightingale, which creates a neat ring composition across the single Heroides, from Penelope (Her. 1) to Sappho (Her. 15), both associated with the bird. 75. Sappho as/like nightingale: e.g. Hermesianax fr. 7.50 Powell; schol. Luc. Imag. 18 (p. 186 Rabe). Daulias: Rosati (1996) 215 n.39; Woodman (2012) 142. Thucydides (2.29.3) mentions poets calling nightingales ‘Daulian’, but no surviving Greek text preserves this name (unless we accept Pfeiffer’s Callimachean conjecture Δαυλιάδες: see n.50 above); given that Sappho is both the imagined author of Heroides 15 and a major source for Catullus, she is a likely candidate to be Thucydides’ referent. 76. Thorsen (2014) 165, further noting that Sappho uniquely describes herself in the third person here, ‘breaking down the epistolary fiction and thus rendering the figure of Sappho more distant, at the same time as Ovid’s presence as the poem’s extratextual author becomes all the more imposing’. 77. Cf. Harrison (2007); for Virgil and elegy, see esp. 59–74 (Ecl. 10) and 210–14 (Aen. 4).

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78. The Procne myth still resonates obliquely through the comparison with Orpheus: both Procne and Orpheus lose the object of their song (and of their love) through their own conduct (filicide/ looking back on Eurydice). 79. Monella (2005) 244. Cf. quereris, Am. 2.6.7. 80. This association of Orpheus and the nightingale may also reflect a pre-existing tradition: according to a detail preserved in Myrsilus of Methymna (FGrH 477 F2) and Pausanias (9.30.6), nightingales were said to sing most sweetly around Orpheus’ tomb. 81. On duritia as anathema to the elegiac universe and the inversion of mollitia, see Cairns (1979) 102; Hinds (1987a) 21–22, 141 n.58; Kennedy (1993) 31–34; Fabre-Serris (2013); Klein (2013). For elegiac terminology more generally, see Keith (1999a). The durus arator may also also fit a larger tradition of uncouth rustics threatening helpless birds: Mesomedes’ lyric εἰς κύκνον features a ‘Museless rustic goatherd’ (ἄμουσος … αἰπόλος ἀγρότας, fr. 10.4–5 Heitsch) who almost captures a swan which is stuck on a frozen river but escapes at the last minute. Mesomedes was a Hadrianic poet, but West (1974) 162 suspects that this story lies behind Theogn. 1097–1100, in which case the episode could have already been known to Virgil and evoked here, especially given the icy conditions of Orpheus’ wandering. Allusion to the swan, as another elegiac bird (see Section IV), would be particularly apt; cf. too Pl. Resp. 10.620a (Section II above) for Orpheus’ association with the swan elsewhere. 82. For Virgil’s awareness of the bird’s elegiac resonance, cf. too Eclogue 6, where the mention of Gallus (64–73) is closely followed by the story of Philomela (78–81), only interrupted by the myth of Scylla (74–77), a story of female lamentation which also has elegiac overtones: cf. n.50 above. 83. Arnott (1977), (2007) 123. For ancient testimony, see esp. Aristot. HA. 615b2–5; Cic. Tusc. 1.73; and the further references gathered by Thompson (1936) 181–82; Arnott (2007) 123. Like Pliny, Alexander of Myndus was sceptical (Ath. 9.393d). 84. On Aeschylus’ engagement with the Aesopic fables here, see Harris (2012). 85. Tr. Emlyn-Jones and Preddy (2017) 400–3. 86. The swan is frequently pictured as the steed of Venus (e.g. Hor. Carm. 3. 28. 13–15, 4. 1. 10; Ov. Ars am. 3. 809–10, Met. 10.708; Sil. Pun. 7.441–42). See Prop. 3.3.39–40 for an explicit contrast between the elegiac poet’s ‘snow-white swans’ (niueis … cycnis) and the ‘sound of a strong horse’ (fortis equi … sonus) which leads to arma, i.e. epic; see Nelson (forthcoming) §2b. 87. E.g. Il. 2.459–63; Anacreontea 60.8 West; Ov. Met. 5.386–87; Sil. Pun. 14.189–90; Philostr. Imag. 1.11.3; Himer. Or. 40.1, 47.4, 48.7. 88. Cf. e.g. Nagle (1980) 22–23, noting too Trist. 5.1.48 (tibia funeribus convenit ista meis), where tibia refers simultaneously ‘to the flute-playing customary at funerals, the mournful mood of the exilic elegies, and the flute of elegy.’ 89. Ovid draws on a pre-existing tradition of comparing white hair with swan’s plumage: cf. Ar. Vesp. 1064–65; Eur. HF 691–94; Hor. Carm. 2.20.9–12 (with Nisbet and Hubbard (1978) 341–42). Ovid’s physical deterioration in Trist. 4.8 also echoes the opening of his collection, Tristia 1.1, which is concerned with the shabby state of his own book in exile. 90. Newlands (1995) 180–81; Robinson (2011) 118. Arion was already paired with Orpheus by Virgil (Ecl. 8.55–56); the connection is reinforced here by the echo of Horace’s vocalem … Orphea (Carm. 1.12.7–8) in vocalis Arion (Fast. 2.91). 91. Newlands (1995) 181–82, further noting the parallel ‘downward order’ which Ovid employs to describe Arion’s and Apollo’s accoutrements, moving from head, to cloak, to hands and instrument; cf. Robinson (2011) 127–28. 92. Newlands (1995) 182–83; Robinson (2011) 121–22. On Prop. 2.34, see Stahl (1985) 172–88; O’Rourke (2011). 93. Newlands (1995) 182–83; Robinson (2011) 121–22, who further notes (with thanks to Heyworth: 121 n.8) that ‘Cynthia was … rescued by Arion’s dolphin in Propertius’ nightmare at

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2.26’: Ovid’s association of Arion and Cynthia thus provides a further link back to Propertius’ oeuvre. 94. For such incipit-allusions, cf. esp. Horace, e.g. Carm. 1.9 ~ Alc. fr. 338 Voigt; Carm. 1.12 ~ Pind. Ol. 2; Richmond (1970); Cavarzere (1996). Propertius himself recalls the incipit of Prop. 1.1 near the end of his three-book collection: 3.10.15, 3.21.9–10, 3.21.29, 3.24.2. 95. Newlands (1995) 185–86; Robinson (2011) 133–34; cf. n.89 above. 96. Cf. Newlands (1995) 186–87, further noting the sailor’s arma (2.102), a word loaded with epic associations which Ovid programmatically rejects (in favour of aras) at the start of the Fasti (Fast. 1.13). Robinson (2011) 131–33 suggests that the unusual penna evokes the eagle’s traditional complaint that it was slain by its own plumage, i.e. that it has brought disaster on itself (e.g. Aesch. fr. 139 TrGF; Ar. Av. 807–8), a motif that resonates suggestively against Ovid’s exile. 97. Newlands (1995) 184–85, citing Ahl (1985) 291 for Ovid’s comparable play with the metrically identical tempora (‘temples’) and tempora (‘times’) at Met. 1.4. 98. Later authors also link Arion’s singing with consolation (cf. Gell. NA. 16.19: canere carmen casus illius sui consolabile), lament (cf. Hyg. Astr. 2.17.3: quoniam nemo esset alius qui ut ipse suum questu prosequeretur eventum … suam coepit deflere mortem), and the dying swan (Favorinus [Dio Chrys.] Or. 37. 2; Plut. Sept. Sap. 161c4–8); cf. Robinson (2011) 128–29. 99. For the elegiac aspects of this scene, see too McCallum (2015); and for Virgil’s broader reflections on swans and poetics in the Aeneid, see Malamud (1998) esp. 108–11 on Cycnus. 100. For the textual crux here and printing of Cinyre, see McCallum (2012) 210–11 n.4, (2015) 694– 95 n.6. 101. Amor/formae: McCallum (2012) 221–22, McCallum (2015) 699 n.35. Footnoting ferunt: Horsfall (2016) 114–15. The connection with Phanocles is reinforced by the apparent verbal echo in 190– 91 of another part of his poem, treating the death of Orpheus (fr. 1.3–4 Powell: πολλάκι δὲ σκιεροῖσιν ἐν ἄλεσιν ἕζετ’ ἀείδων | ὃν πόθον): Harrison (1991) 120–21. 102. Cf. Keith (1992) 144. 103. Paschalis (1997) 350–51; Malamud (1998) 110; McCallum (2012) 209–17, (2015) 694–97. On Cupavo, cf. Barchiesi (2005) 267. On Cinyrus, cf. Ahl (1985) 33 n.11, noting that κινυρός is a Homeric hapax legomenon (Il. 17.5). We might also suspect a nod to the Cypriot poet Cinyras, who was also associated with mourning: Franklin (2015) esp. 187–89. 104. Keith (1992) 144–45, citing Prop. 1.1.4, 17, 34 and 1.7.25–26; Ov. Am.1.1.3–4 and 1.2.8. On Amor as a symbol of elegiac poetry, cf. Harrison (2007) 33, 65. 105. On elegiac mollitia, see n.81 above. Note too the contrametrical pun on the verbal connection between cano, ‘I sing’, and caneo, ‘I become white’, as we have already seen in Ovid’s Fasti: cănit, 191; cānentem, 192. 106. Although Virgil does not specify the swan’s association with prophecy here, his mention of Cycnus fits with his broader emphasis on local traditions of Etruscan prophecy (cf. e.g. the immediately following description of Ocnus, the son of ‘prophetic Manto’, fatidicae Mantus, Aen. 10.198–99). 107. Keith (1992) 140–41. Cf. e.g. Hor. Epist. 2.1.224–25 (cum lamentamur non apparere labores | nostros et tenui deducta poemata filo). 108. Cf. the other two swan transformations in the Metamorphoses: (1) Met. 7.371–81, a tale of spurned love (spreto … amore, 375) in which a different Cycnus jumps off a cliff and transforms into a swan; his mother Hyrie melts away through weeping (flendo, 380) and becomes a pool. (2) Met. 12.64–145, where an invulnerable Cycnus, Neptune’s son, fights Achilles, but transforms into a swan after being trapped and strangled. The first clearly evokes an elegiac world of unhappy love and lamentation; the second is less obviously elegiac, but may still evoke the genre in its undermining of masculine epic heroism (Cycnus’ armour is merely ornamentation, decor, 90; Achilles’ hand is weak, debilis, 106; Cycnus dies by strangulation, ‘a typically feminine and shameful mode of death’: Keith (1999b) 232); cf. Fear (2005) on masculine liminality in elegy. For

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Callimachean/unHomeric readings of this episode, see Möller (2003); Papaioannou (2007) 50–86. See too Heslin (2016) for Ovid’s undermining of Homeric trustworthiness. 109. Myers (1994) 108–11. For the etymological association of the Camenae, see e.g. Varro, Ling. 6.75 and 7.27, with de Melo (2019) II 875, 930–32; Serv. ad Ecl. 3.59 (Camenae musae, quibus a cantu nomen est inditum). 110. Hardie (2010) 45, cf. 44–47 more generally on ‘Elegiac Canens’. 111. On elegiac error and its possibly Gallan/Parthenian associations, see Ross (1975) 62–64; Cairns (2006) 227–28. Cf. too Ecl. 10.55 (lustrabo); Prop. 1.1.11 (errabat); Virg. Georg. 4.519 (lustrabat); Parth. Amat. narr. 36.5 (ἀλωμένη). Earlier intriguing precedent is offered by the pastoral poetess Eriphanis, mentioned by Clearchus, whose lovestruck wanderings (πλανωμένη) prompted both people and wild beasts to weep (συνδακρῦσαι, Clearchus fr. 32 Wehrli = Ath. 14.619c–d). 112. From this perspective, we might be able to reinterpret the voice of Silius Italicus’ Teuthras whose voice ‘could surpass dying swans’ (linguam, | uincere linquentes uitam quae possit olores, Pun. 11.437–38). Casali (2006) 580 suggests that this declaration ‘is an implicit claim on Silius’s part of the superiority of his own “banqueting poet” over the banqueting bards of the earlier epic tradition.’ But given the generic association of the dying swan, we could perhaps see Silius asserting the authority of his epic over the elegiac tradition (just as Teuthras’ Virgilian model, Iopas, marks Virgil’s rejection of another genre, cosmological poetry: White (2006)). 113. See Herrlinger (1930) 87–90; Van Dam (1984) 336–67, esp. 338–40; Dietrich (2002); Newlands (2005). Statius, like Ovid, signposts his allusive imitation: imitator (Silv. 2.4.2), cf. n.63 above. 114. Lyric: e.g. Hor. Carm. 2.20, 4.2.25. Paean: Castrucci (2013). Cf. too Papaioannou (2004) on the swan in Ovidian epic and Thévenaz (2004) on the bird as emblem of rhetoricians. 115. Cf. vox … tenuata (Ov. Met. 2.373); sono tenui (Met. 14.429); ore … deficiente (Trist. 5.1.12). Cf. Hardie (2010) 45 n.94. This emphasis on the swan’s dying and dwindling voice contrasts with Horace’s focus on the bird’s lofty lyric grandeur (nec tenui ferar | penna, Hor. Carm. 2.20.1–2; multa … levat aura … | … in altos | nubium tractus, 4.2.25–27). 116. Cf. Ahl (1982) 389. Cf. too Id. 12.6–7: the ‘most tuneful’ nightingale is ‘shrill-voiced’ (ἀηδών | συμπάντων λιγύφωνος ἀοιδοτάτη πετεηνῶν). 117. Cf. West (1992) 45; Hardie (2010) 42. 118. Ahl (1982) 389 n.52: Il. 19.5 (κλαίοντα λιγέως: Achilles mourning for Patroclus); Od. 10.201 (κλαῖον δὲ λιγέως: Odysseus’ men grieving over past suffering); Od. 11.391 (κλαῖε δ’ ὅ γε λιγέως: Agamemnon’s lamenting shade); Od. 16.216 (κλαῖον δὲ λιγέως: Odysseus’ and Telemachus’ mournful cries of reunion); Od. 21.56 (κλαῖε μάλα λιγέως: Penelope weeping over Odysseus’ bow). 119. Liquidus: cf. Hardie (2010) 42. Swan song: Lucr. 4.547–48 (et convallibu’ cycni intortis ex Heliconis | cum liquidam tollunt lugubri voce querellam, ‘and when from the winding valleys of Helicon the swans raise up a shrill lament with a mournful voice’; the text of v. 547 is corrupt; I follow the suggestion of Smith at Rouse and Smith (1992) 318–19). Cf. Ov. Am. 1.13.8 (et liquidum tenui gutture cantat avis, ‘and a bird sings shrilly from its slender throat’). Lament: e.g. Hor. Carm. 1.24.2–4 (praecipe lugubris | cantus, Melpomene, cui liquidam pater | vocem cum cithara dedit). Argutus: cf. Prop. 1.18.25–30, Stat. Silv. 2.4.13 above. 120. For ὀξέως, cf. too Commentarius Melampodis, GG I.3, p. 21.3–5: ἡ γὰρ λύπη τῇ παρατροπῇ τῆς φωνῆς ἐκ τοῦ κλαυθμοῦ ὀξύτερά τινα παρεισάγει (‘For as a result of a change in the voice from weeping, grief introduces a rather sharper note’). 121. See ἠχή … λιγυρῆς … λύρης (fr. 1.16 Powell), λίγειαν … Ὀρφείην … κεφαλήν (fr. 1.17–18), χέλυν … λιγυρήν (fr. 1.19). 122. Ancient evidence suggests that the aulos was used in at least some elegiac performances, although scholars debate how central it was to the genre: for differing views, see e.g. Faraone (2008); Budelmann and Power (2013); Sbardella (2018), all with further bibliography. Notably, the

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aulos was also closely connected with the song of the nightingale: cf. Aristophanes’ Birds, where the nightingale appears to have been played by the aulos-player: Barker (2004); Weiss (2017) 260– 63. 123. I thank Lawrence Kowerski for drawing my attention to this intertext. The phrase recurs at Od. 24.204, concluding the Underworld conversation of Amphimedon and Agamemnon, in which both bemoan their own fates. 124. Cf. e.g. Klooster (2011) 189. On critical debate surrounding this apparent patronymic and the name of Mimnermus’ father, see Kazanskaya (2018). 125. On elegiac sweetness, see Hunter (2006a). The Scholia Vaticana to Dionysius Thrax closely identify elegiac sweetness and shrillness (GG I.3, p. 173.17–18): «λιγυρῶς» ἤγουν γλυκερῶς, λιγὺς γὰρ ὁ γλυκύς. 126. Lucr. 4.180–82 = 909–11: suavidicis potius quam multis versibus edam; | parvus ut est cycni melior canor, ille gruum quam | clamor in aetheriis dispersus nubibus austri: Donohue (1993) 29–31. 127. Cf. Ars P. 77–78 (Section I); Didym. Περὶ ποιητῶν (n.55 above). 128. Hunter (2006a) 122 with n.12, citing Meliadò (2003) 16 n.46 [non vidi]: Eustathius praises Homer for being ὀλιγόστιχος and γλυκύς (Il. 369.43 = I 583.21 van der Valk); cf. Dio Chrys. 53.6 (ἡδεῖαν). 129. This sweetness may also be connected with the aulos, an instrument to which elegy was often performed (cf. n.122 above), and which was often associated with sweetness itself (e.g. Pind. Ol. 10.93–94: ἁδυεπής τε λύρα | γλυκύς τ’ αὐλός; Bacchyl. 2.12: γλυκεῖαν αὐλῶν καναχάν, ‘sweet clang of flutes’). 130. See Sberna (2015) on the prologue’s swan and its association with a λιγύς aesthetic. 131. Telò (2019). The iambic associations of the donkey may add a further layer to Callimachus’ dismissal of the beast’s dissonant din in the Aetia prologue (fr. 1.29–32 Harder); he distances himself from iambic roughness in favour of elegiac refinement.

ABSTRACTS

In this paper, I explore how Greek and Roman poets alluded to the lamentatory background of elegy through the figures of the swan and the nightingale. After surveying the ancient association of elegy and lament (Section I) and the common metapoetic function of birds from Homer onwards (Section II), I analyse Hellenistic and Roman examples where the nightingale (Section III) and swan (Section IV) emerge as symbols of elegiac poetics. The legends associated with both birds rendered them natural models of lamentation. But besides this thematic association, I consider the ancient terms used to describe their song, especially its shrillness (λιγυρότης/liquiditas) and sweetness (γλυκύτης/dulcedo) (Section V). I demonstrate how these two terms connect birdsong, lament and elegiac poetry in a tightly packed nexus. These birds proved perfect emblems of elegy not only in their constant lamentation, but also in the very sound and nature of their song.

INDEX

Mots-clés: aesthetics, elegy, lament, metapoetics, nightingale, shrillness, swan, sweetness

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From Cumae to the Po: Italian Itineraries in Aeneid 6

Micah Y. Myers

I would like to thank the editors and staff of Dictynna, the anonymous referees, Nandini Pandey, and audiences at the University of Lisbon and the University of Siena, where earlier versions of this paper were presented. The paper is much improved thanks to their comments; any deficiencies that remain are my own. I also offer special thanks to Bill Gladhill, who has inspired me to think about Aeneid 6 in new ways.

1 Early in Aeneas and the Sibyl’s visit to Elysium in the sixth book of the Aeneid, the two katabatic travelers enter fields featuring their own sky, stars, and sun (638-41). There they witness souls participating in various sorts of recreation, Orpheus and Aeneas’ illustrious Trojan ancestors among them (642-55). Aeneas next observes other groups dining and performing in a chorus (656-7). The passage reaches a crescendo with a list of Elysian inhabitants: those who were wounded fighting for their country, chaste priests, pious vates, seers, and innovators, with Musaeus at the center (660-7). In the midst of his description of this section of the Underworld, Vergil supplies a curious geographical detail that links Elysium with the Eridanus, a mythical river that by Vergil’s time had long been associated with the Po (656-9):1 conspicit, ecce, alios dextra laevaque per herbam vescentis laetumque choro paeana canentis inter odoratum lauris nemus, unde superne plurimus Eridani per silvam volvitur amnis.

Behold—Aeneas caught sight of others to the right and left across the grass, dining and singing the cheerful paean in a chorus through a grove fragrant with bays, out of which above on earth the mighty stream of the Eridanus rolls through the forest.

2 The object of the present paper is to explore some implications of the Po’s presence in these verses. My primary goal is to contend that this reference connects Aeneas’ Elysian telos to the Po region, just as the entrance to the Underworld in Aeneid 6 is closely linked to Cumae. Further, I consider these two geographical reference points in the context of Aeneas’ katabasis in order to propose that the mention of the Eridanus

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evokes aboveground travel from Cumae to the Po corresponding to his Underworld journey.

3 To be clear, my proposition in this paper is not that Aeneid 6 presents Aeneas literally traveling underground from Cumae to the Po. Despite the geographic elements and the hodological nature of aspects of Aeneas’ katabasis, the Underworld of Book 6 resists being mappable.2 Vergil likewise leaves the precise geo-spatial relationship between the Aeneid’s Underworld and upper world uncharted. Moreover, since in Georgics 4 Aristaeus encounters subterranean rivers with aboveground courses ranging from Scythia to Italy during his watery katabasis to his mother’s home (4.365-73), it is clear that in the Vergilian conception the subterranean has a complex spatial relationship with the upper world. Rather, I shall argue that the symbolic geography of the Book 6 links Elysium to the Po region. Philip Hardie, in his article, “In the Steps of the Sibyl: Tradition and Desire in the Epic Underworld,” observes more broadly about Aeneid 6 and Greco-Roman katabasis traditions that: “In the capacious kingdom of Death anyone who has ever lived, anywhere in the world, is present in one place and one time” (2004: 143). While Hardie is concerned with the implications of this conception of the Underworld on tradition and memory in Aeneid 6, he also points eloquently towards how the Underworld has a global scale and an intricate relationship to the world above. Perhaps then we should not be surprised that Aeneas’ katabatic journey has connections across Italian geographical space.

4 Part I of the paper surveys references to travel and geography in Aeneid 6 in order to show that connecting aboveground travel through Italy to Aeneas’ katabasis resonates with the geopoetics and travel thematics of the epic, as well as recalling the journey aspect of Underworld traditions from the Odyssey onwards. This section provides a foundation for re-approaching Vergil’s reference to the Eridanus-Po within the context of travel and geography.3 Part II considers literary and mythical traditions about the Eridanus that form the background for Vergil’s reference to it in Aeneid 6. This section also reviews previous interpretations of Vergil’s description of the Eridanus. Part III looks at how Vergil’s mention of the Eridanus engages with ancient ideas about rivers and subterranean fluvial passages, and with the related notion that the Underworld was accessible through bodies of water and other geological formations around the Mediterranean. This section of the paper builds on the discussion of Vergilian geopoetics and travel in Part I to conclude that rivers’ fundamental role in defining geographic space in Roman contexts creates a strong link between Vergil’s reference to the Eridanus and the Po region through which its aboveground course runs. In addition, the Po’s connection to Cisalpine Gaul in Roman mental geography combines with the Aeneid’s engagement with the notion that the Underworld stretches beneath various regions of Italy to suggest a symbolic aboveground journey from Cumae to the Po corresponding to Aeneas’ katabasis.4 The final section of the paper (Part IV) explores how a Cumae to the Po itinerary recalls Vergil’s own movements around Italy and his connections to these regions. While the sphragis to the Georgics presents Campania as a space for Virgil to compose his poetry, through the reference to the Eridanus, Virgil’s patria flows into Elysium and the Parade of Heroes. I argue that the link to Vergil’s patria recalls the first pronouncement of his epic project at Georgics 3.1-48, where his poetic ambitions are presented as a metaphorical temple on the banks of the Mincio, a tributary of the Po. A connection to Vergil’s patria also complicates Aeneid 6’s depiction of the Elysian afterlife and Rome’s future glories by linking them to references to the

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costs that civil war exacted upon the Po region in the Eclogues and Georgics. Throughout the paper my approach is influenced by the “spatial turn” and “mobility turn” that have occurred across cultural studies over the last few decades. The spatial turn examines space not as an objective, inert dimension in which activity occurs, but as socially constructed and, in turn, a fundamental factor in the construction of societies and individuals. The mobility turn highlights the movement of humans and things through the places and spaces that the spatial turn brings to the fore. The mobility turn also analyzes movement in relation to sedentarism and other sorts of immobility.5 By applying these concepts to the Aeneid, this paper aims to elucidate some of the ways that Virgil’s poetry reflects upon the role of space and mobility in the epic tradition and in the Roman experience.

5 Before proceeding further, let us consider an additional reason to think of Cumae and the Po as two important points of reference in Aeneas’ katabasis. Vergil’s description of the entrance to the Underworld at Avernus contains an intertext with Apollonius’ Argonautica (Aeneid 6.237-41): spelunca alta fuit vastoque immanis hiatu, scrupea, tuta lacu nigro nemorumque tenebris, quam super haud ullae poterant impune volantes tendere iter pennis: talis sese halitus atris faucibus effundens supera ad convexa ferebat.

There was a cave, deep and dreadful with a huge mouth, jagged, sheltered by a dark lake and gloomy groves, over which no birds could safely wing their way; such an emission pouring from its black mouth was borne to the world above.

6 Vergil’s depiction of Avernus with its fumes toxic to birds engages with Apollonius’ description in Argonautica 4 of gases, likewise noxious to avians, that are released from the site where Phaethon fell into the Eridanus (596-603): ἐς δ᾽ ἔβαλον μύχατον ῥόον Ἠριδανοῖο· ἔνθα ποτ᾽ αἰθαλόεντι τυπεὶς πρὸς στέρνα κεραυνῷ ἡμιδαὴς Φαέθων πέσεν ἅρματος Ἠελίοιο λίμνης ἐς προχοὰς πολυβενθέος· ἡ δ᾽ ἔτι νῦν περ τραύματος αἰθομένοιο βαρὺν ἀνακηκίει ἀτμόν. οὐδέ τις ὕδωρ κεῖνο διὰ πτερὰ κοῦφα τανύσσας οἰωνὸς δύναται βαλέειν ὕπερ· ἀλλὰ μεσηγὺς φλογμῷ ἐπιθρώσκει πεποτημένος.

They entered the innermost stream of the Eridanus, where once Phaethon, struck by blazing lightning, fell half-burned from Helios’ chariot into the outpouring of a deep pool. Even now it still emits noxious vapor from a smoldering wound. Nor is any bird able to stretch its wings and fly over it, but in mid-flight it falls into the flame.

7 Vergil’s allusion to Apollonius here is well established.6 Yet in my view there is an additional dimension of the intertext has not yet been appreciated. Namely that, via Apollonius, Aeneid 6 connects Avernus and the Eridanus.7 The allusion encourages thought of Apollonius’ Eridanus at the beginning of Aeneas’ katabasis at Cumae and, in turn, recollection of the entrance to the Underworld at Cumae when the Eridanus is mentioned later in Aeneid 6. It is this connection, as well as the geo-spatial and travel dynamics that the connection creates, that will be the focus of this paper.8

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I. Surveying the Territory: Travel in Aeneid 6

8 Underlying my argument about an aboveground journey evoked by Aeneas’ katabasis is the importance of travel in Vergil’s epic. From Aeneas’ Mediterranean wanderings after the fall of Troy to the pronouncements of Roman imperium extending to the edges of the earth, the Aeneid offers a vision of the Roman world that is predicated upon travel, both in the mythological past and in the Augustan present. As Alessandro Barchiesi observes (2017: 151): “With a plot that spans three continents and embraces the majority of the ethnic groups and nations around the Mediterranean, the Aeneid is the most international among ancient epic poems (‘internationale Epik’, cf. Norden 1999 [1901] 149).”9

9 Among all of the travel in the Aeneid, the sixth book stands at the crossroads on many levels, functioning as a nexus of the journeys within the poem. Aeneid 6 offers a vantage point in the middle of the epic for characters and readers alike to look back at the journey from Troy and forward to Aeneas’ movements through Italy as well as the journeys of his descendants in the service of Roman imperial expansion. Book 6 opens with the Trojans at sea, though by the second verse they are arriving at Cumae, whose shores are called Euboean (Euboicis Cumarum ...oris), an epithet that brings to mind journeys of colonization from Aegean Greece to Magna Graecia.10 While the other Trojans make camp (5-8), Aeneas stays in motion, ascending to the temple of Apollo and to the Sibyl (9-13). Cumae, in addition to being the Trojans’ first stop in Italy, is also the terminus of Daedalus’ flight from Crete (14-17), a journey memorialized by Apollo’s temple, whose doors bear images that in turn evoke still further travel: the annual voyage between Athens and Cnossos undertaken in recompense for the death of Androgeus (20-3) and the wandering that the labyrinth forced upon the Minotaur and its victims (24-7). The latter is an internal journey, but also one that is aimless and seemingly perpetual, like Aeneas’ up until this point in the poem. Vergil’s description of the labyrinth as an inextricabilis error (“insoluble wandering,” 27) resonates with his presentation of Aeneas’ wanderings as errores (first at 1.755). Within Book 6 the parallel between the error of the Minotaur’s maze and Aeneas’ is reemphasized when Deiphobus refers to Aeneas’ travels as errores (532-3): pelagine venis erroribus actus/ an monitu divum? (“Do you come driven by your wanderings over the sea or by the gods’ instruction?”). Moreover, Daedalus’ solving of the labyrinth’s error brings him, like Aeneas, to Cumae.11 Even what Daedalus is unable to depict on the doors of the temple to Apollo recalls travel, as Vergil fills in the blanks that the artist left with a mention of Icarus’ fatal flight, his death echoed in the falling motion of Daedalus’ hands (30-3). Moreover, both Icarus’ death and Daedalus’ hands enact downward motions that anticipate Aeneas’ katabasis.

10 Once Aeneas meets the Sibyl, more travels and descriptions of travel arise. Aeneas recounts his journey to Italy during his prayer to Apollo (58-61). The Sibyl confirms the end of Aeneas’ wandering at sea, yet prophesies subsequent journeys to the future site of Lavinium and to Pallantium (84-97), the latter described with travel terminology as the via prima salutis (“first path to safety,” 96). She also sends Aeneas into the woods on an expedition for the golden bough. Moreover, the Sibyl guides Aeneas through an Underworld that is presented as a place that one not only travels to, but also through.12 From the outset, Aeneas’ katabasis is described with the terminology and imagery of movement and travel. For example, iter is used nine times in Book 6, appearing at

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prominent moments, as the following survey indicates. When Aeneas pleads with the Sibyl for her help getting to the Underworld, he asks her to teach him the iter (109). Three verses later Aeneas utters the word iter again to describe his travels after Troy, undertaken alongside his father: ille meum comitatus iter (“[Anchises] accompanied me on my course,” 112). This repetition of iter emphasizes the parallel between Aeneas’ katabatic journey and the travels that he undertook with Anchises after leaving his home. Similarly, as Aeneas and the Sibyl move through the unlit first portions of the Underworld, Virgil compares it to an iter through a forest on a dark night (270-2). After meeting Palinurus, as Aeneas and the Sibyl draw near the Styx, Vergil again presents their movement through the underworld as an iter: ergo iter inceptum peragunt (“So they continued on the journey that they had begun,” 384). Vergil also refers to Aeneas and the Sibyl’s movement as an iter at 477, subsequent to his interaction with Dido, an encounter in turns characterized by the latter’s complete lack of motion (469-71) and by her swift movement away from Aeneas (465-6, 472-3). The language of movement is also reflected in Vergil’s use of via, a word appearing eleven times across Book 6, especially at liminal and interstitial moments in the katabasis, where the poet sets them down a path from one episode of the narrative to another. Vergil emphasizes the Underworld viae upon which Aeneas and the Sibyl progress as they set out on their journey (260), as they pass from the monster-filled vestibulum to the banks of the Acheron (295), and again at the point when the path through the underworld divides into two routes (540). By one via lies the iter to Elysium; the other goes to Tartarus (541-3). Vergil’s repeated uses of iter and via emphasize the journey aspect of the katabasis, putting Aeneas and the Sibyl in motion through the Underworld and creating a sense of movement away from the Cumaean entrance towards Elysium and Anchises.

11 The descriptions of movement during Aeneas’ katabasis are also a way in which the poem emphasizes how this episode is yet another journey for the hero who from the opening of the Aeneid is defined by his motion, much tossed on land and sea (1.3). Along these lines, it is noteworthy that the first familiar souls that Aeneas encounters in the Underworld—Leucaspis, Orontes, and Palinurus—are fellow Trojan travelers who met death at sea during those seven years of wandering: ventosa per aequora vectos/ obruit Auster (“The South wind overwhelmed [Leucaspis and Orontes] as they voyaged over windy seas,” 6.335-6); qui Libyco nuper cursu…/ exciderat puppi ([Palinurus,] who on the voyage from Libya…had fallen from the stern,” 338-9).13 These souls who lost their lives while sailing recall Aeneas’ own previous journeys while also anticipating Aeneas and the Sibyl’s crossing of the Styx in Charon’s boat. During this latter trip the focus is on Aeneas’ mass and the strain it places on the skiff rather than the progress across the river, until suddenly they are trans fluvium and being let out on the bank (410-16).

12 Passing over further analysis of the travel terminology in the various sections of the Underworld through which Aeneas moves as he sees the different sorts of the untimely dead (426-534) and the aforementioned divide in the katabatic via that provides a vantage point for the description of Tartarus (548-627), we find that the travel terminology continues as the two travelers arrive in Elysium. When Musaeus addresses Aeneas and the Sibyl he uses trames, here with a sense similar to via, to describe the route to reach Anchises: facili iam tramite sistam (“now I will set you on an easy path,” 676). As Aeneas finally reaches Anchises, the latter is reviewing souls destined to be reincarnated and make the journey back to the upper world: animas superumque ad lumen ituras (“souls destined to pass to the light above,” 680, cf. 720-1, 750-1). After

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catching sight of his son, Anchises tearfully addresses him in a manner that emphasizes Aeneas’ journeys to reach him (687-8, 692-3): venisti tandem, tuaque exspectata parenti vicit iter durum pietas?.... quas ego te terras et quanta per aequora vectum accipio! quantis iactatum, nate, periclis!

“Have you come at last, and has the devotion your father counted on conquered the difficult journey?” …. “I welcome you after you have traversed what lands and what seas! Tossed, my son, by what dangers!”

13 Anchises describes Aeneas’ arrival as pietas having conquered an iter durum (687-8). The language in 687-8 recalls Anticlea in the Odyssey’s nekyia remarking to her son how difficult it is for the living to visit the dead (Od. 11.155-6). In 692 Vergil has Anchises use phrasing that presents Aeneas’ journeys on land and sea in a manner that evokes the opening description of Odysseus’ travels in the Odyssey (1.1-4), as well as Catullus’ journey to his brother’s grave in poem 101.14 In addition, the presence of iactatum in 693 after terras and aequora in 692 introduces an allusion to the first description of Aeneas’ travels at Aeneid 1.3 (multum ille et terris iactatus et alto [“that man much tossed on land and sea”]), which in turn again refers to the depiction of Odysseus’ travels in the opening of the Odyssey.

14 When Anchises begins describing Aeneas’ future descendants in the Parade of Heroes, another sort of mobility is evoked, as his words are replete with descriptions of conquest and the military movements empire-building entails.15 Here Book 6 points to the travels of Romans who are agents of imperium, a type of travel that reminds us that Aeneas’ journeys in the first half of the Aeneid are through places that will become part of the Roman empire. Among the most explicit references to imperial mobility, conquest, or colonization in the Heldenshau are: the founding of the Alban colonies (773-6); Rome as the center of worldwide empire (781-2); Augustus’ empire extending to the edges of the earth (794-805); the civil war between Caesar and Pompey (830-1); Mummius’ conquest of Greece (836-40); the Scipios in Africa (842-3); and M. Claudius Marcellus with the spolia opima, fighting Carthaginians and Gauls (855-9). Anchises’ apostrophes during his speech also relate colonial and imperial themes, and depend upon travel to be fulfilled. Thus he encourages Aeneas to “extend his might” and “colonize the land of Ausonia” (extendere vires/...Ausonia... consistere terra, 806-7), and he appeals to tu...Romane to rule nations with imperium (851). Moreover, Anchises’ prophecies about Aeneas’ descendants not only foretell future travel; as Kris Fletcher observes, it is also the poem’s most elaborate justification of why Aeneas’ journey to Italy is necessary.16 Book 6 also ends with travel, travel as quickly paced as in the opening verses of the book, as Aeneas ascends from the Underworld, returns to his fleet, and sails to Caieta in the final four verses (898-901). This paper endeavors to uncover, in the midst of all of this movement, an additional journey from Cumae to the Po implied by the reference to the river in 6.658-9, verses to which I now return.

II. Vnde Superne: Vergil’s Elysian Eridanus

15 The preceding excursus points to the prevalence of travel and other sorts of movement in Aeneid 6. As in other katabasis narratives, Aeneas’ progress in Book 6 is also marked by references to rivers.17 When Aeneas first asks the Sibyl about the entrance to

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Underworld, he describes it as at a backflow of the river Acheron (106-7). Charon and his ferry are located at a convergence of the Acheron, Cocytus, and Styx (295-7, 323). Subsequently, Aeneas observes the Phlegethon river surrounding Tartarus with its flaming streams (550-1). When the Sibyl asks Musaeus in Elysium where to find Anchises, river crossing becomes metonymical for their katabasis, as she explains that in order to see Aeneas’ father “we have sailed across the great rivers of Erebus” (magnos Erebi tranavimus amnis, 671). Her words here recall verse 134, where she describes Aeneas’ request to go to the Underworld as a desire “to sail the Stygian Lake twice” (bis Stygios innare lacus).18 In part of his reply to the Sibyl, Musaeus notes that Elysium features riverside living: riparumque toros et prata recentia rivis/ incolimus (“we inhabit cushioned riverbanks and meadows freshened by streams,” 674-5). The Parade of Heroes likewise occurs adjacent to a river, in this case the Lethe (705, 749). The rivers that Aeneas encounters during his journey through the afterlife may also resonate with the tradition, unmentioned but likely alluded to in the Aeneid, that Aeneas himself ended his mortal existence at or near the Numicus River.19 Finally, as already noted, when Aeneas first reaches Elysium, the Eridanus-Po makes an appearance.

16 As quoted at the beginning of the paper, the Aeneid presents the Eridanus thus: unde superne/ plurimus Eridani per silvam volvitur amnis, 658-9. Regarding Vergil’s phrase unde superne, there are three interpretations. The ambiguity lies mostly in superne, which can indicate “from above”, “to a higher level”, or simply “above”.20 There is also dispute over the related question of whether the silva in 659 is part of the Elysian nemus mentioned at 658 or is in the upper world, with most critics concluding that the silva is aboveground.21 Some take superne as meaning “from above”, contending that the Elysian laurel grove in 658 is to be imagined as on a hillside and the Eridanus is flowing down from the top of that hill.22 A second critical camp sees superne as indicating “above in the upper world” an interpretation that understands the Eridanus as simply running above Elysium, and not being subterranean at all.23 Although these two interpretations also evoke the Po region, in this paper I follow the most common interpretation, found in commentaries ranging from Servius to Norden to Horsfall, which is to take superne with unde to indicate that the Eridanus runs from Elysium to the upper world.24

17 Why does Vergil mention the Eridanus here? The river has an extensive mythical heritage as well as some subterranean and Underworld connections. The earliest extant mention of the Eridanus occurs in Hesiod, where it is listed among the offspring of Oceanus and Tethys (Theog. 337-8).25 Greg Nagy deduces further connections in early myth and epic between the Eridanus and Oceanus.26 By the 5th century BCE the river had become the site of Phaethon’s fall to earth.27 Herodotus indicates that the Eridanus was thought to flow into the ocean at the edge of the earth in far northern or northwestern Europe, even as he expresses his doubt that the river exists, asserting that it is a poetic fiction (3.115). Yet already in Pherecydes the Eridanus was identified with non-mythical rivers, including the Rhone, but most of all the Po.28 Strabo, like Herodotus, does not believe that the Eridanus exists, but he records a tradition that placed the river near the Po rather than identifying it with the Po itself (5.215). The Padane connection is reflected in Roman contexts by Propertius 1.12.4 (Veneto...Eridano). Vergil’s references to the Eridanus in the Georgics also connote the Po (fluviorum rex [“king of rivers”], 1.482; cf. 4.371-3). From Servius onward commentators have interpreted the Eridanus-Po’s appearance in Aeneid 6’s Underworld as a reference

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to the notion that the Po flows underground for some distance, an idea that Vergil himself may gesture towards when he concludes his catalogue of subterranean rivers in Georgics 4.365-73 with the Eridanus.29 Servius ad Aeneid 6.603 and a scholium to Euripides Orestes 981 offer a different link between the Eridanus and the Underworld, making the river the body of water where Tantalus spends his afterlife being punished. Where past critics have noted the Eridanus-Po’s subterranean associations in relation to its appearance in Aeneid 6, the next section of the paper follows the river’s flow unde superne to consider how the reference links Vergil’s Elysium to the Po region. Furthermore, I contextualize the mention of the Eridanus in relation to Greco-Roman concepts about rivers and to the emphasis on movement and journeys in Book 6 discussed in Part I.

III. From the Underworld to the Upper World

18 So far, we have seen that Vergil’s mention of the Eridanus-Po may resonate with subterranean and Underworld traditions about the river. This section aims to shift the focus to what the reference to the Eridanus may reveal about the connection between Vergil’s Underworld and the upper world, and about the relationship between Aeneas’ katabatic journey and aboveground itineraries through Italy. I consider two factors that encourage this shift in focus to the upper world: (1) rivers possess fundamental importance for Greco-Roman conceptualizations of geographic space and for defining and orienting oneself within space; and (2) the Aeneid presents the Acheron river, similar to the Eridanus, as flowing between the Underworld and the world above at three different points, as if the Underworld lies beneath much of Italy. This second point will provide new support for interpreting unde superne as describing the Eridanus-Po flowing from Elysium to the upper world. Finally, this section argues that the geo-spatial role of rivers, along with the Aeneid’s presentation of the Underworld stretching beneath Italy, combines with the broader travel thematics of Book 6 to suggest a symbolic aboveground journey from Cumae to the Po corresponding to Aeneas’ katabasis.

19 As noted at the beginning of the previous section, rivers are an important geo-spatial feature of the Underworld in Aeneid 6 and in katabasis traditions more generally. Yet this aspect of the Underworld is but a shade reflecting the geo-spatial role of rivers in the upper world. Bodies of water are critical to Greco-Roman conceptualization, formation, and demarcation of landscapes, geography, boundaries and borders. The geo-spatial functions of water are reflected in the many ancient toponyms derived from rivers, springs, and lakes, as well as in the way that, from Herodotus to Seneca to periploi and itineraria, ancient geographical descriptions reference bodies of water to mark segments of a journey and to organize space.30 Rivers in particular could be conceptualized as natural, social, and political borders on scales from the local to the continental.31 Consider, to take a handful of famous examples, Caesar’s riverine divisions of Gaul at the opening of the Bellum Gallicum, his crossing of the Rubicon, or rivers such the Nile, Phasis, or the Tanais, thought of as the boundaries between Africa, Asia, and Europe.32 Yet if (in both the ancient and modern world) rivers offer good ways of demarcating space and conceptualizing boundaries, they also encourage interaction at and across those boundaries by providing water for drinking and irrigation as well as food sources that attract human activity and settlement. Moreover, while a waterway

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might hinder the land traveler, who must find some way to ford it, rivers themselves are always in motion, and also allow for modes of water transportation that promote movement, trade, and cultural interaction.33 Thus rivers can be at once conceived of as borders and also as the zones of intensified cultural and economic exchange that C. R. Whittaker explores in his discussion of frontier zones throughout the Roman empire.34 This double-sidedness of rivers is demonstrated by the Po itself, conceptualized at times as a border, dividing the Cispadane and Transpadane regions. Yet the Po is in other instances conceived of as the central artery of Cisalpine Gaul.35 While I do not suggest that the reference to the Eridanus-Po at Aeneid 6.558-9 activates all of these notions about rivers, the role of waterways in conceptualizing geographical space links rivers to specific places. It follows then that the reference to the Eridanus-Po flowing from Elysium to the upper world does not just characterize Vergil’s Elysium, but also evokes the aboveground region through which it runs.

20 There is another factor that supports the connection between the reference to the Eridanus and the Po region, as well as the interpretation of unde superne as describing the Eridanus starting in Elysium and then flowing up to earth level. Namely, that elsewhere in the Aeneid and, more generally in ancient sources, we find additional descriptions of bodies of water connecting the Underworld and the upper world. The most immediate example occurs earlier in Book 6. As already mentioned, when Aeneas first asks the Sibyl to take him to the Underworld, he notes that the entrance to the infernal region is characterized by a marsh fed by the backflow of the Acheron river: hic inferni ianua regis/ dicitur et tenebrosa palus Acheronte refuso (“...this is said to be a doorway of the king of the Underworld, and this the shadowy swamp where the Acheron flows backwards,” 106-7). Above I observed that the noxious vapors released at Avernus recall a similar tradition about the Eridanus in the Argonautica, creating a parallel between the two places. By having rivers flow from the Underworld to the upper world at both the entrance to the Underworld and at Aeneas’ Elysian telos, Vergil provides another correspondence between Cumae and the Po.

21 In Aeneid 7 the Acheron emerges at two additional points in Italy, a feature that in my view furthers the sense that Aeneas’ katabasis does not take place only beneath Cumae, but is on some level also connected to Italian geographical space more generally. Moreover, given the emphasis in Aeneid 6 on the katabasis as travel discussed in Part I, Vergil’s references to Underworld entrances around Italy reinforce the notion that when Aeneas comes to the Eridanus, he has made a journey that symbolically corresponds to an aboveground trek from Cumae to the Po region. In Book 7, after Allecto has set in motion the war between the Trojans and Latins, she seeks a return to the Underworld, described in fluvial terms as the “home of the Cocytus” (Cocyti...sedem, 562). She finds an entrance at Ampsanctus and its crater lake (Modern Valle d'Ansanto in Campania). Vergil describes Ampsanctus, with its sulfurous gases, as a vent of Dis, a place where once again the river Acheron breaks through to the upper world (568-70): hic specus horrendum et saevi spiracula Ditis monstrantur, ruptoque ingens Acheronte vorago pestiferas aperit fauces

Here are displayed a frightful cave and the exhalations of fierce Dis. A great chasm opens its poisonous jaws where the Acheron breaks forth...

22 Vergil’s depiction of Ampsanctus with its noxious gases and the Acheron’s stream recalls the Cumaean entrance to the Underworld in Book 6. Poisonous gases and water

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ascending from infernal regions are, as previously noted, elements also associated with the Eridanus-Po. Earlier in Book 7 Latinus consults Faunus’ oracle at Albunea. There sulfurous gases are again emitted, this time from a fons: quae.../ fonte sonat saevamque exhalat opaca mephitim (“[Albunea] which echoes with a spring and darkly breathes forth deadly gas,” 83-4). Vergil compares Latinus hearing a prophecy from Faunus with a description of a priest at Albunea having an experience evocative of a nekyia and engaging in conversation with the Acheron (7.86-91): huc dona sacerdos cum tulit et caesarum ovium sub nocte silenti pellibus incubuit stratis somnosque petivit, multa modis simulacra videt volitantia miris et varias audit voces fruiturque deorum conloquio atque imis Acheronta adfatur Avernis.

Here when the priest has brought his offerings and lay down on the skins of felled sheep and sought sleep in the stillness of night, he sees many shades fluttering in strange ways, hears varied voices, and enjoys conversation with the gods, and speaks to the Acheron in the depths of Avernus.

23 Like the Underworld entrances at Cumae and Ampsanctus, Albunea includes the emission of gases and the Acheron.36

24 On one level, with these references Vergil engages with the notion that places around the Mediterranean where noxious gases were released were linked to the Underworld. Such places are termed in sources variously as Plutonia, Charonea, Acheronteia, or spiracula.37 Servius relates that Varro composed a list of such locations in Italy (ad Aen. 7.563). Similarly, the repeated mentions of the Acheron reaching the upper world find parallels in other sources. Herodotus 6.74, Pliny NH 2.231, and Pausanias 8.17 report that the Styx runs aboveground in Arcadia near Nonacris. According to Strabo 5.4.5, the Styx and Phlegethon feed springs near Avernus. Lucan 9.355 links the Lethe in North Africa to the Underworld river of the same name. These traditions of rivers running from the Underworld to the upper world offer further support for the interpretation of Vergil’s description of the Eridanus as flowing from Elysium to the world above. At the same time, by having the Acheron flow into the upper world at three different places, Vergil brings into the Aeneid the notion of the Underworld stretching beneath Italy. This notion is reinforced by the connection to the Po region that the reference to the Eridanus creates.

25 As this section has demonstrated, when Vergil references the Eridanus he names a river that in Roman mental geography is tethered to the Po region. Moreover, by having the Eridanus flow from the Underworld to the world above (unde superne) Vergil engages the concept found elsewhere in the Aeneid and more broadly across classical literature that the Underworld has outlets around Italy and the Mediterranean. These two factors combine with the geographical and travel elements of Aeneas’ katabasis (and the Aeneid more broadly) to suggest an aboveground itinerary corresponding to his Underworld journey. That is, from Cumae to the Po. The next section of the paper will argue that the full significance of such a journey lies not just within the Aeneid; it also lies in the Roman context in which the epic was written, and especially in the points of contact it has with Vergil’s own life and previous poetry.

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IV. From Cumae to the Po: Vergilian Resonances

26 Aeneas’ aboveground journeys through Italy in the Aeneid do not take him further north than Pallantium, although the Mantuans that join the Trojan side in Book 10 bring him into contact with Transpadanes (198-203). The aboveground itinerary from Cumae to the Po evoked by Aeneas’ katabasis, however, mirrors Vergil’s own movements around Italy during his lifetime. Campania and Cisalpine Gaul were, of course, two places of great importance to the poet, summed up in the opening of his supposed epitaph recorded in Donatus: Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc/ Parthenope (“Mantua gave birth to me, the Calabrians snatched me away, now Parthenope holds me,” Vita 36). Vergil’s connections to Campania are also indicated in the sphragis of the Georgics (4.563-4), in a fragment of a letter from Augustus to Vergil preserved in Priscian that places the poet in Naples (GL 2.533K = Aug. Ep. fr. 35 Malc.), and in Catalepton 5.8-10 and 8, which associate Vergil with the Naples-based Epicurean Siro. A papyrus upon which Vergil’s name appears, interpreted as indicating that he visited the Villa of the Muses at Herculaneum, offers further evidence of his activities in the region.38

27 While the Campanian starting point of Aeneas’ katabasis locates him in the area where Vergil spent time as an adult, the reference to the Eridanus configures Aeneas’ journey to see the shade of his dead pater, Anchises, as bringing him from Campania to Vergil’s Cisalpine patria. Connecting Elysium to the Po is potentially a sentimental move for Vergil as a Transpadane poet: paradise as patria.39 The issue of patria is central to the Aeneid’s story of the Trojan migration to Italy and of the struggle of transitioning from one patria to another. In addition the importance of patria to Vergil’s poetry is evident from the beginning of his oeuvre through the juxtaposition of Tityrus staying in his homeland and Meliboeus departing from it. Vergil highlights this issue by having Meliboeus repeat patria twice in the poem’s opening: nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arva;/ nos patriam fugimus (“I am departing the bounds of my homeland and its lovely fields; from my homeland I am going into exile,” Ecl. 1.3-4). In Eclogue 1 rivers are linked to patria as well, since included among Tityrus’ good fortune is getting to stay among flumina nota (“familiar waterways” 51). An etymology of Mantua offers an additional reason to think of Vergil’s patria in relation to the Underworld. Aeneid 10.198-200 derives Mantua’s name from the prophetess Manto. Servius, however, connects the city’s name to the Etruscan god Mantus, the equivalent of Pater Dis (ad Aen. 10.198).40 By linking the Po to Elysium, Aeneid 6 may offer an oblique reference to Mantua’s chthonic connection, allowing the Underworld to flow into the Po region and the Po region to flow into the Aeneid’s infernal spaces.

28 Vergil’s reference to the Eridanus in the middle of the Aeneid offers particular resonance with the depiction of his Mantuan patria at the mid-point of the Georgics (3.1-48).41 Here, in lines that anticipate the Aeneid, Vergil states that he will return to his homeland bearing poetic glories (10-12).42 He pledges to construct a temple on the banks of the Mincio, his native river and a tributary of the Po. The setting for the temple “on a verdant plain” (uiridi in campo, 13), “beside the water” (propter aquam, 14) “where the great Mincio wanders” (ingens...errat/ Mincius, 14-15) offers parallels to the description of Elysium in Aeneid 6. There Virgil again refers a campus (6.653), greenery (per herbam, 656) and a great river flowing (plurimus Eridani...volvitur amnis, 659). The poetic glories that in Georgics 3 Vergil predicts he will bring to Mantua—the Muses,

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Idumaean palms, and the epic poetry for which the temple is a metaphor—also have correspondences in the verses surrounding the reference to the Eridanus in Aeneid 6. Directly prior to mentioning the Eridanus, Vergil describes Aeneas observing inhabitants of Elysium “singing the cheerful paean in a chorus through a grove fragrant with bays” (laetumque choro paeana canentis/ inter odoratum lauris nemus, 657-8). This Elysian chorus in the midst of laurel beside the Eridanus-Po gives the scene an Apolline, poetic dimension, similar to the manner in which Vergil locates his future poetic honors and endeavors at Mantua on the banks of the Mincio in Georgics 3.43 Likewise, Vergil’s claim in Georgics 3.18 that he will drive chariots beside the Mincio is reflected in Aeneid 6 a few verses prior to the Eridanus reference when Aeneas catches sight of Ilus, Assaracus, and Dardanus with their chariots (650-1). In addition, the description of Dardanus at 6.650 (Troiae Dardanus auctor) recalls the description of Apollo at Georgics 3.36 (Troiae Cynthius auctor).44 Finally, Vergil’s image of Envy in the Underworld at the conclusion of the description of the temple at Georgics 3.37-9 resonates with the katabasis of Aeneid 6. The mention of the Eridanus in Aeneid 6 recalls the opening of Georgics 3 in that Vergil symbolically situates the Po region in the middle of the Aeneid, much as in the mid-point of the Georgics, by means of a metaphorical temple, Vergil situates his future epic endeavors in the Po region. From this perspective the reference to the Eridanus in Aeneid 6 reverses the flow of rivers and texts, channeling back to the Georgics and up the stream of the Mincio to the first pronouncement of Vergil’s epic project.45

29 Much as the Mincio flows near the Po, Vergil places near his Elysian Eridanus another Underworld river, the Lethe, with the latter river serving as the site of the Parade of Heroes, as noted above.46 By locating the souls of future Roman heroes in an area connected to the Po region, Vergil offers a vision of Rome as deeply connected to a larger Italy. Such a vision could accord with Octavian/Augustus’ incorporation of Cisalpine Gaul fully into Italy in 42 BCE.47 Conversely—or perhaps simultaneously— connecting the Heldenshau to the Po region points towards negative effects that Rome’s imperial project had upon the area during Vergil’s own lifetime. From this perspective, the many soldiers that Roman generals, especially in the 1st century BCE, drew from the Po region to fill the ranks of armies—souls in many cases destined to go from the battlefield to the Underworld—loom over the Parade.48 Indeed, a connection to the Po region might be read into the verse that follows the reference to the Eridanus and begins the list of inhabitants of the area: hic manus ob patriam pugnando vulnera passi (“here was a group that endured wounds fighting for their patria,” 660). Along similar lines, the links between the Po region, Elysium, and the Parade of Heroes also point Vergil’s readers back to his laments in the Eclogues and Georgics about land confiscations in his patria (Ecl. 9.27-9, Georg. 2.198-9). In short, by engaging with aboveground Italian geography in this section of the Underworld, Aeneid 6 finds another way for the cost of empire to cast its shadow upon Anchises’ triumphal vision of the future.

Conclusion

30 This paper has endeavored to bring Vergilian geopoetics and travel thematics to bear on a single reference to the Eridanus-Po, to contextualize the reference in relation to journeys in the Aeneid and in Book 6 in particular, and to uncover latent aboveground mobilities symbolically enacted by Aeneas’ katabasis. In addition, I have speculated

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about how this aboveground journey resonates with travel Vergil himself undertook, as well as ways in which linking Elysium to the Po region recalls Vergil’s earlier representations of his patria and imbues his Underworld with a Padane tint. If Vergil does project his home region onto Elysium and vice versa, he anticipates one of our most significant contemporary poets, Seamus Heaney. Heaney was a lifelong reader of Vergil, whose own translation of Aeneid 6 was published posthumously in 2016. In his 2007 poem “The Riverbank Field”, which features the post-script “after Aeneid VI, 704-15 & 748-51,” Heaney brings elements of Vergil’s Elysium into his own home in County Derry in Northern Ireland. The poem begins: Ask me to translate what the Loeb gives as “In a retired vale...a sequestered grove” And I’ll confound the Lethe in Moyola

By coming through Back Park down from Grove Hill Across Long Rigs on to the riverbank— Which way, by happy chance, will take me past

The domos placidas, “those peaceful homes” Of Upper Broagh....49

31 In these verses the topography of Aeneid 6 and Heaney’s Derry converge for a poet in motion (“By coming through...Which way...will take me past”). The Lethe flows into the River Moyola, and the river of forgetting becomes part of the topography of home, a monument of memory. Heaney’s approach is similar in a poem that appeared together with “The Riverbank Field”, “Route 110”, which maps moments from his own life onto Aeneid 6. Heaney’s receptions of Vergil here point to the way that, among the enormous variety of katabatic and eschatological traditions that Vergil engages with in Aeneid 6, he also brings something of the familiar, something of home, to his Underworld for Aeneas to experience at the climax of his katabatic journey.

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NOTES

1. The Eridanus and its association with the Po are discussed in detail below, as is the interpretation of unde superne and per silvam in the following quotation. Translations of Aeneid 6 are based on Horsfall 2013 with modifications. All other translations are my own. 2. This is an issue well analyzed in Feldherr 1999. 3. On geopoetics see especially Barchiesi 2017: 152, who uses the term in relation to the Aeneid “to describe the dynamics formed by the representation of the world, in particular its geopolitics, when it encounters the active participation of the poetic text in the making, aetiology, and transformation of this world.” Cf. White 1992: 174. Interest in Vergil’s engagements with geography is longstanding: see esp. Rehm 1932; McKay 1970; Reeker 1971; Della Corte 1972; Cairns 1989: 109-128; Fletcher 2014. For recent discussion of the journey aspect of katabaseis, see

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esp. Herrero de Jáuregui (forthcoming) and the comparative approach of Bremmer, esp. 2009. On travel and movement in the Aeneid see now also O’Sullivan 2019. 4. In this paper I use “Po region” and “Cisalpine Gaul” to refer to roughly the same area. For the overlap between the two see Brill’s New Pauly s.v. “Gallia Cisalpina.” 5. On the spatial turn: Foucault 1980 and 1986; Lefebvre 1991 [1974]; Bourdieu 1977; Tuan 1978; Soja 1989; in classics see esp. Nicolet 1991; Horden and Purcell 2000; Purves 2010; Skempis and Ziogas 2014; Rimell 2015; Rimell and Asper 2017; Fitzgerald and Spentzou 2018. Mobility turn: Clifford 1997; Sheller and Urry 2006; Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006; Cresswell 2011; Knappett and Kiriatzi 2016. 6. See Nelis 2001: 244-6 with further references. Vergil also engages with the tradition about Avernus’ gases already found in Timaeus fr. 57; Lucretius 6.740-8; Varro fr. 381 GRF (= Pliny NH 31.21). 7. As Reeker 1971: 56 n.118 observes, Tzetzes ad Lychophron 704 likewise connects Avernus’ vapors with the Eridanus. 8. Such narrative framing by bodies of water finds a parallel in Aeneid 8 where rivers offer intricate frames to the book and to the shield ecphrasis, as discussed by Feldherr 2014. See also the discussion in Section II of the role of rivers in framing and marking progress in Aeneas’ katabasis. 9. See also Fletcher 2014: esp. 12-27 on the geo-political ramifications of Aeneas’ journey, particularly in relation to colonization narratives. On the latter topic cf. Horsfall 1989. 10. Vergil’s reference to the founding of Cumae by Greek colonists is reiterated at 6.17 and 42. Horsfall 2013: 2.66-7 sums up discussion of the anachronism of the reference to Greek colonization. 11. On similarities between Aeneas’ wanderings and the labyrinth, see Catto 1988 with further references. Cf. Aen. 5.588-93, where the complex equestrian maneuvers during the lusus Troiae are compared to the inremeabilis error (“unfixable wandering,” 591) of the labyrinth. See Quint 2018: 109-113 on connections between the lusus Troiae and Book 6. 12. Cf. Clark 2001: 104 on Vergil’s expansion of “the geography of the Underworld, so as to increase the reader’s sense of the vastness of Aeneas’ journey.” See also Feldherr 1999 on mapping and resistance to mapping in Aeneid 6 and now Pandey 2018: 143-158. 13. Palinurus’ death at the hands of plunderers at the shore (6.358-61) also evokes travel in that it is a motif of shipwreck narratives: Horsfall 2013: 2.277. On the mention of Libya in this passage, when the Trojans were sailing from Sicily, see Horsfall 2013: 2.279-80. Palinurus also requests that Aeneas make an additional journey in order to bury his body (6.365-6), although the Sibyl prophesies a different outcome. 14. 101.1-2: multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus/ advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias (“Having traversed many people and over many seas I come, brother, to these sorrowful rites”). For the triangulation between Vergil, Catullus, and the Odyssey here, see Conte 1986: 32-9; cf. Hardie 2012 esp. 222-4. 15. For the theme of imperial expansion in the Parade of Heroes see esp. Horsfall 1976: 82-5. The manner in which Feeney 1986 highlights the ambiguities in Anchises’ presentation of Roman imperium represents an important approach to this passage in a variety of subsequent scholarship. 16. 2014: 24; cf. 215-16. But n.b. the observation of Most 2001: 169-70 that Aeneas appears not to remember anything he learns in the Underworld during the second half of the epic. 17. E.g., Plato Phaedo 111e-14b. See also Mackie 1999 on Underworld rivers in Homer. Rutledge 1971: 110 observes the importance of bodies of water throughout Aeneid 6. On the role of rivers in the Aeneid see also Jones 2005: 64-7; Feldherr 2014.

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18. The Sibyl’s prophecy of the Italian War likewise emphasizes rivers, comparing the ‘Tiber foaming with much blood” (Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine, 6.87) to the Simois and Xanthus in the Trojan war (88-9). 19. See Christmann 1976; O’Hara 1990 104-11; Dyson 2002: 50-73. 20. Horsfall 2013: 2.453; cf. OLD s.v. 21. Serv. ad Aen. 6.659; Norden 1957: 300; Butler 1920: 218-19; Paratore 1978: 315-16; Horsfall 2013: 2.454. Contra Austin 1977: 208: “...it is absurd to differentiate the silva from the nemus and to refer it to some forest in the upper world.” 22. Heyne 1800: 3.256 (cf. Henry 1969 [1889]: 371-2, who reviews several earlier commentators, including Heyne, who interpret in this manner, although Henry himself reaches a different conclusion; see below); Fletcher 1955: 81; Perret 1982: 179-80. Bremmer 2009: 201-2 considers this interpretation in relation to the description in 1 Enoch of a stream cascading downwards in that text’s description of Paradise. 23. Papillon and Haigh 1892: 2.243; Butler 1920 218-19; Greenough, Kittredge, and Jenkins 1923: 186. 24. Servius ad Aen. 6.659; Conington 1884: 2.513; Henry 1969 [1889]: 371-3; Chase 1883: 253; Knapp 1900: 390; Norden 1957: 299; Mackail 1930: 241; Williams 1972: 500; Johnston 2012: 84. With reservations: Page 1894: 486; Austin 1977: 208. Summarized well by Horsfall 2013: 2.453, who concludes that the words unde superne “naturally indicate here that the Eridanus starts in Elysium and thence flows ‘at earth level’ through [above ground] forests” (his italics). 25. Hesiod also mentions the Eridanus in fr. 150.23 M-W, where the river’s association with amber is first attested. 26. 1990: 236-9: (1) Theog. 338 gives the Eridanus the epithet “deep-swirling”, which Hesiod otherwise only applies to Oceanus; (2) there is a variant reading of Il. 16.151 that changes Oceanus to Eridanus; (3) Phaethon falls into the Eridanus like the sun sets into the Oceanus; (4) both rivers are associated with poplar trees, the Eridanus via the transformed Heliades, Oceanus at Od. 10.508-12, as Odysseus comes to the entrance to the Underworld. 27. The earliest extant reference is Eur. Hipp. 735-41, although Pliny NH 37.31 also cites Aeschylus as among the first sources, perhaps a reference to the latter’s Heliades; see Diggle 1970: 4-5, 27-30. 28. Pherecydes FGrH 3 F 74 associates it with the Po; the Adriatic context of Euripides Hipp. 735-41 likewise suggests the Po. Aeschylus fr. 73 Radt identifies the Eridanus as the Rhone, but also places it in Iberia. Schol Bern. ad Georg. 1.482 (p. 275 Hagen) (= FGrH 3 696 F 34 f) notes that Ctesias locates the river in India, Choerilus in Germany, Ion of Chios in Achaea. There is also a waterway in Athens of the same name: Plato Critias 112a; Callimachus fr. 458 Pf.; Strabo 9.1.19; Pausanias 1.19.5. 29. Serv. ad A. 6.659: Padus vocatur: quem alii etiam ad inferos volunt tendere, alii nasci apud inferos et exire in terras (“It is called the Po, which some assert reaches even to the Underworld, while others assert that it begins in the Underworld and flows out into the upper world.”) Pliny NH 3.117 also notes that the Po runs partially underground. Plato Phaedo 111c-114b reflects traditions about subterranean rivers more broadly. Cf. Dewar 1991 on traditions about a subterranean course of the Tigris. 30. Purcell 1996: 201-3, 2012: 375-6, and 2017; Braund 1996; Jones 2005; Campbell 2012: 53-62, 98-100; Franconi 2017: 14-15. Rogers 2018 surveys Roman “water culture.” In addition, the manipulation and control of water, e.g., through aqueducts or drainage systems was a fundamental part of Roman imperialism: see esp. Purcell 1996; cf. Freudenberg 2018: 142 for some poetic responses in satire. 31. Nicolet 1991: 27 n. 20; Purcell 2012; Campbell 2012: 62-4. See also Jones 2005: 37-47 on ancient ethnography and rivers. 32. Rivers are already conceptualized as continental boundaries in Herodotus 4.45; cf. Thomson 1948: 254 for examples in Roman sources.

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33. See Purcell 1996: 200 on the inherent “mobility of water.” 34. Whittaker 1994. Braund 1996 and Purcell 2012 discuss the tension between Roman conceptions of rivers as frontiers and the evidence for them facilitating communication and transport. 35. Purcell 1990. 36. Horsfall 2000: 96-104 discusses the location of Albunea, Vergil’s engagement with incubation oracle traditions, and similarities with Aeneas’ katabasis in Book 6. 37. See esp. Varro (Servius ad Aen. 7.563; Isidorus Etym. 14.9.1-2); Pliny NH 2.207-8; Strabo 5.4.5, 13.4.14, 14.1.11, and 14.144; cf. Cicero Div. 1.79, with the comment of Pease 1920: 232-4. Ennius fr. 222 Skutsch uses spiramina instead of spiracula, but Skutsch notes that the words are synonymous. He also catalogues several other instances of poetic uses of both words (1985: 398-9). There are of course many places conceived of as entrances to the Underworld described neither with gases nor an infernal river, such as Vergil’s presentation of the cave at Taenarum where Orpheus begins his katabasis at Georgics 4.467-8. 38. P. Herc. Paris 2.279A. See Gigante and Capasso 1989; Gigante 1995: 47. 39. The Padane elements of Aeneid 6’s Elysium have been noted by Reeker 1971: 56; Della Corte 1972: 116. 40. For the Mantua-Mantus connection: Colonna 1999 and 2006; The Virgil Encyclopedia 2.785; Brill’s New Pauly s.v. Mantus. 41. On the importance of this mid-point not only of the Georgics but of Vergil’s entire oeuvre, see esp. Thomas 1985 and 2004; Nelis 2004. 42. Giusti 2018 n. 27 reviews scholarship about the relationship between this passage and the Aeneid, including dissenting views. 43. On the Apolline context of this section of Elysium in Aeneid 6 see Miller 2009: 147-9 with Horsfall 1993 and 2013 2.452-3. Note also Orpheus’ Elysian chorus (644-7), the pious vates and those who said things worthy of Apollo (662), and the central presence of Musaeus among Elysium’s inhabitants (667-8). Rivers themselves can carry a poetic dimension, as they are among the types water presented in Greco-Roman literary traditions as metaphors for poetry, poetic inspiration, and poetic talent; see esp. Jones 2005; Worman 2015: 78-85 and 251-9; Freudenberg 2018; Rimell 2018. 44. Miller 2009: 148. 45. On the relationship between the Mincio and the Po it is also worth recalling Strabo’s reference at 5.215 to a tradition that makes the Eridanus not the Po itself, but a nearby river—like the Mincio (see above). 46. Cf. Della Corte 1972: 117 who likewise sees the surroundings for the meeting between Anchises and Aeneas as evoking a Padane landscape. 47. Octavian’s extension of Italy to the Alps was the last in a series of reforms beginning in the 80s BCE to incorporate Cisalpine Gaul into Italy; see Chilver 1941: 7-10. Servius ad Aen. 1.1 sees a reflection of the tension about Cisalpine Gaul’s relationship to Italy in the seeming contradiction between Vergil’s presentation of Aeneas as the first to reach Italy in the opening lines of the Aeneid and Venus’ reference to Antenor already having founded Padua at 1.247-9, well discussed in Reed 2007: 192-3. On representations of Italy in the Aeneid, see also Toll 1991 and 1997; Ando 2002. 48. See Chilver 1941: 112-13 on the Roman military drawing on the population of this area. 49. “The Riverbank Field” as well as its companion poem “Route 110” were republished in the 2010 collection Human Chain from which I quote here (p. 47). Murphy 2016 contextualizes these poems within Human Chain and Heaney’s oeuvre more broadly; see now Harrison, Macintosh, and Eastman 2019.

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ABSTRACTS

This paper explores the Aeneid’s geopoetics and travel thematics in relation to Vergil’s inclusion of the Eridanus-Po river in his description of Elysium (Aen. 6.558-9). The paper proposes that the reference to the Eridanus evokes an aboveground journey from Cumae to the Po region that symbolically corresponds to Aeneas’ Underworld journey in Aeneid 6. To support this supposition, the paper surveys references to travel in Aeneid 6; reviews previous interpretations of 6.558-9 as well as mythical and literary traditions relating to the Eridanus; and demonstrates the fundamental role of rivers for Greco-Roman conceptualizations of geographical space. The final section of the paper speculates about how a journey from Cumae to the Po resonates with travel that Vergil himself undertook during his lifetime, and considers ways in which linking Elysium to the Po region recalls Vergil’s earlier poetic representations of his patria and imbues his Underworld with a Padane tint.

INDEX

Keywords: Aeneid, Aeneas, Campania, Cisalpine Gaul, Cumae, Elysium, Eridanus, Geography, Geopoetics, Katabasis, Parade of Heroes, Po, Rivers, Rome, Travel, Underworld, Vergil

AUTHOR

MICAH Y. MYERS

Kenyon College [email protected]

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Nescioquid maius: Gender, Genre, and the Repetitions of Ovid’s Medea

Barbara W. Boyd

I. The Birth of a New Genre?

1 In the first stasimon of Euripides’ Medea, the chorus of Corinthian women expresses sympathy for the grim fate that Medea faces, sentenced to an isolated exile (Med. 431-45). The lament of the chorus opens with generalizing reflections on the common fate of women, destined only for slander if mentioned at all by the poets; though no poets are identified by name, it is easy to imagine that Hesiod and Semonides would be at the head of a very long list.1 In terms that are both wistfully evocative of a utopia in which men rather than women would be objects of distrust, and palpably ironic following the preceding speech of Medea detailing her own devious stratagems (364-409), the chorus imagines a profound reversal of the prevailing social and cultural order that oppresses women (410-20). In this alternative universe, restorative justice will take poetic form (417-30): ἔρχεται τιμὰ γυναικείῳ γένει· οὐκέτι δυσκέλαδος φάμα γυναῖκας ἕξει. μοῦσαι δὲ παλαιγενέων λήξουσ᾿ ἀοιδῶν τὰν ἐμὰν ὑμνεῦσαι ἀπιστοσύναν. οὐ γὰρ ἐν ἁμετέρᾳ γνώμᾳ λύρας ὤπασε θέσπιν ἀοιδὰν Φοῖβος ἁγήτωρ μελέων· ἐπεὶ ἀντάχησ᾿ ἂν ὕμνον ἀρσένων γέννᾳ. μακρὸς δ᾿ αἰὼν ἔχει πολλὰ μὲν ἁμετέραν ἀνδρῶν τε μοῖραν εἰπεῖν.

Honor is coming to the female race: no longer will ill-sounding repute take possession of women. The Muses of poets born long ago will cease from hymning my faithlessness. For Phoebus Apollo, leader of songs, did not grant god-inspired song accompanied by the lyre to our knowledge;

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since [otherwise] I would have sung a song in opposition to the race of men. For the fullness of time has much to say about both our destiny and that of men.

2 In an influential discussion of these verses, Froma Zeitlin notes that this radical vision entails nothing less than the creation of “a new genre of poetry that celebrates the exploits of women rather than those of men”;2 the impossibility of such a creation is implicit in Zeitlin’s reading. More recently, however, Marianne Hopman has argued that Euripides’ play itself enacts this new genre through its metapoetic reflection on what the genre of tragedy can and cannot do.3 Hopman focuses attention on the interaction of gender and genre, suggesting that, while the epic tradition in which the saga of the Argo arises is fundamentally androcentric, Euripides claims a new identity for tragedy to distinguish it from epic; in this new identity, tragedy reveals itself to be “congenial to women,”4 and in the process declares its freedom from the strictures of the epic code. In Hopman’s reading, epic kleos remains inaccessible to women by virtue of their gender’s association with revenge; on the tragic stage, however, Medea (and others like her) can at least temporarily appropriate it.5

3 The exploration of and experimentation with the limits of genre, along with a distinct interest in exploring alternative perspectives on kleos offered by female protagonists, are well-known features of Euripides’ work; it is not surprising, therefore, that Ovid looks first and foremost (though not exclusively, as we shall see) to Euripides when he takes up the story of Medea—and not once, but repeatedly. Only two fragments of his own Medea tragedy have survived,6 and they are too slight to offer any new insight into how Ovid’s version might have drawn on or differed from the Euripidean one; in fact, Dan Curley has argued that perhaps its most interesting feature was, and remains, its singularity—that is, that in spite of the turn to tragedy heralded in the Amores, especially poems 3.1 and 3.15, all the available evidence indicates that Ovid wrote only one such play, and then returned to elegy.7 This singularity is indeed noteworthy, especially since Ovid’s interest in tragedy is quite obvious elsewhere in the corpus of his work; but unlike Curley, I want to focus instead on how Ovid uses the character and story of Medea repeatedly, and how the phenomenon of repetition itself is not only self- referential but also metatextual, allowing Ovid both to explore and to comment upon the generic parameters of his work and upon the possibility of creating something new. 8 First, however, I return to Euripides, whose emphasis on Medea’s gender is a crucial aspect of his (and her) challenge to the boundaries of genre; thereafter I move on to consider how Ovid appropriates and responds to this emphasis, in the process testing, and at least temporarily exceeding, the very boundaries he foregrounds.

II. Surviving Motherhood

4 In her first speech on the Euripidean stage, Medea juxtaposes the fate of women in Athenian culture to that of men (Med. 230-58). Men, she says, are the recipients of honor and glory in return for their display of military valor, in recompense for which they gain both public recognition and material goods; and they receive all this in addition to the economic advantage that they derive from the possession of a wife and her dowry. Women’s lives are anonymous by comparison, even ignominious—especially the lives of foreign women like her—and the only alternative to obscurity available to

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them is the risk of social disgrace. Even the physical phenomenon of childbirth, avers Medea—not only labor, but the constant threat of death—is so exceptional an experience, so terrifying, that she would choose to have stood on the field of battle three times rather than to have given birth a single time: “I would prefer to stand by my shield in the line of battle three times rather than to bear a child once” (…ὡς τρὶς ἂν παρ᾿ ἀσπίδα | στῆναι θέλοιμ᾿ ἂν μᾶλλον ἢ τεκεῖν ἅπαξ, 250-51). 9 Medea thus compares her situation as a tragic character with that of all the heroes—naturally, all male—of Greek epic, and asserts that in becoming a mother she has surpassed all the accomplishments of men on the battlefield. In addressing the difference between male warriors and herself, Medea challenges the hierarchy upon which this difference is based, simultaneously suggesting that the truly heroic undertaking, the truly exceptional achievement, is not in fact that performed by men but is hers.10

5 In the world of epic, the absolute finality of death on the battlefield is countered by epic’s insistence on affirming the survival of a civilization at a moment of crisis: through the epic poet’s use of similes depicting an alternative universe of peace and harmony with nature, the destruction that is narrated within the poem is countered by the very survival of the poem itself and its poet—a counterpoint that thus has a simultaneously ideological and literary dimension.11 When Euripides’ tragic Medea compares the life of women to that of men, she offers a very different way of approaching the challenge she faces both as a character in Euripides’ play and as a co- creator of its story: instead of harmony and ideological clarity, she knows only the risks of and to her own womanhood, not sustained by civilization but barely surviving on its fringes. Thus, when she distinguishes between herself and the other women of Corinth (Med. 253-58), she draws attention to the isolation that puts her outside the harmonious confines of life as it is delimited by the gendered world of the citizens, men and women, of Athens. As opposed to the world of Homeric epic, where human experience is organized around stabilizing binaries (peace/war; male/female; Greek/Trojan), the world that Medea inhabits is complex and unstable; in it there are no clear points of reference for her experience. The identity that Medea defines for herself—the identity that will make her immortal—is sui generis, making her an outlier even on the tragic stage, a place that has room to accommodate vulnerable heroines like Phaedra, Alcestis, and Electra. Medea understands that the continuity promised by epic ideology can only be destructive to her, and that the solution, therefore, lies not in maintaining continuity, but in destroying it.

6 In his study of the literary heirs to Virgilian epic, Philip Hardie has demonstrated how the relationship between epic poets and their models is often configured through self- referential allusions involving a relationship of dependence, paternity, or succession.12 In other words, characters who can be identified as descendants of the central figures of earlier literary tradition, e.g., descendants of the Trojan or Theban heroes, frequently offer a model for the construction by younger poets of a relationship with their predecessors, represented as parents or ancestors. Medea constitutes a unique challenge to this model of intertextuality: she has broken all links to her past life in Colchis with the betrayal of her father and the murder of her brother, and she repeatedly destroys the familial bonds of others, as seen with the families of Pelias and Creon. Most important, she does this as a woman. Euripides offers a radically new revision of the intertextual trope of paternity when, with his Medea, he portrays a mother who kills her children in order to ensure her own survival in subsequent

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literary tradition; in other words, he replaces epic paternity with the embodiment of a self-consuming maternity that enables a self-perpetuating succession. The male heroes of Greek epic wage war and confront superhuman challenges that assure their survival in the memory of posterity; waging her own private war with Jason, Medea instead ensures her own survival by annihilating the memory of her descendants and negating any possibility of Jason’s succession.13

7 Underscoring the physical ability necessary to fight on the one hand and to give birth on the other, Euripides’ Medea asserts on her own behalf the heroic status that society normally makes available only to men—like Jason; at the same time, she problematizes the dramatic action to follow. In killing her children, Medea also negates her own status as mother and any distinction attached to that status. Yet her power and control over the situation only increase with the death of her children; Euripides makes this point explicit both textually and visually when he uses the deus ex machina device to bring her onstage at the close of the play, with the dead children at her feet in the winged chariot that hovers over Jason (1317-22).14 And as Hopman has argued, Medea’s power and control as manifested at the end of the play can be read in a metapoetic light, emphasizing as they do her “appropriation of the tragic genre”15: as she wreaks her revenge, she both creates her own tragedy and comments on her ability to transcend it.

8 This closing scene guarantees Medea’s survival into the future; she has already secured a promise from Aegeus of safe harbor in Athens, and as Euripides’ Athenian audience would have known well, her career in myth is far from over. Simultaneously, however, Medea’s infanticide constitutes an inversion of narrative time, along the lines of what Alessandro Barchiesi calls the “future reflexive,”16 since it restores Medea to her childless status and so reverses the reproductive imperative.17 Maternity is a fundamental concern of Greek myth, as it is a cornerstone not only of the family but of civilized society writ large; childbearing and child care define the appropriate function and place of mortal women in the Greek patriarchy.18 Mature women without children rarely escape their definition as children themselves: Electra typifies the oxymoron of the adult female child, unable to move beyond her traumatic childhood, while characters like Antigone and Polyxena reveal the vulnerability of girls who are not yet married, dying before they can assume maternal responsibilities. Medea, on the other hand, has already experienced the most crucial transitions in the female life-cycle, moving from childhood and virginity to sexual awakening and marriage (as she considers her union with Jason) and then to motherhood; through infanticide, however, she negates this natural progression, even as she asserts, ironically, her claim to heroic immortality. With this temporal reversal, in turn, Medea also negates the linear imperative of epic narrative, and replaces it with a pattern of repetition that functions both intertextually and metatextually. This pattern is in turn itself repeated in a dizzying multiplication of temporal dislocations in Ovid.19

III. Back to the Future

9 Ovid’s exploration of Medea’s maternity and the implications of its reversal for her literary career is clearly a response to and development not only of Euripides but also of Apollonius, the latter of whose Medea narrative is constructed as a “prequel” to the plot of Euripides’ play. Apollonius narrates the events that precede Jason and Medea’s

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life together as a couple, devoting the first two books of the poem to the voyage of the Argo and the second two books to Medea’s encounter with Jason and the assistance she gives him, concluding with the departure from Colchis for the shores of Iolcus. Apollonius’ narrative strategy has long been recognized as typical of Hellenistic poetry: in choosing to narrate the less familiar details of the story and to devote a great part of his narrative to the development of a love story instead, Apollonius exemplifies the Hellenistic preference for unusual and alternative versions of traditional tales.20

10 The manner in which Apollonius moves the tragic Medea into an epic framework, furthermore, simultaneously gives concrete form to the narrative transgressiveness of her character and to his own transgressive epic. Apollonius’ Medea is a girl, encountered just as she reaches marriageable age: he repeatedly calls her παρθένος and κούρη, thus emphasizing her status as a virgin and not yet a mother. Nonetheless, he also uses imagery that casts her in a maternal role, thus drawing attention to the oxymoron of her virginal fertility. In response to Aeetes’ demand for the return of his daughter from the Phaeacians, Medea pleads with queen Arete and the men in Jason’s entourage for protection. To illustrate her emotional distress, Apollonius uses proleptic imagery to compare the virgin Medea with a recently widowed mother, who labors far into the night to provide for her children (Argon. 4.1060-67): τὴν δ᾿ οὔ τι μίνυνθά περ εὔνασεν ὕπνος, ἀλλά οἱ ἐν στέρνοις ἀχέων εἱλίσσετο θυμός, οἷον ὅτε κλωστῆρα γυνὴ ταλαεργὸς ἑλίσσει ἐννυχίη, τῇ δ᾿ ἀμφὶ κινύρεται ὀρφανὰ τέκνα χηροσύνῃ πόσιος· σταλάει δ᾿ ὑπὸ δάκρυ παρειὰς μνωομένης, οἵη μιν ἐπισμυγερὴ λάβεν αἶσα· ὣς τῆς ἰκμαίνοντο παρηίδες, ἐν δέ οἱ ἦτορ ὀξείῃς εἰλεῖτο πεπαρμένον ἀμφ᾿ ὀδύνῃσιν.

But sleep did not soothe her even a little, but rather the powerful feeling of pains was whirled in her breast just as when a wool-working woman whirls a spindle through the night, and the fatherless children wail plaintively around her, bereft as she is of her husband; and the tears drip down from her cheeks as she remembers, such a gloomy fate has seized her; thus were Medea’s cheeks moistened, and the heart within her was spinning, pierced about by sharp pains.

11 Apollonius anticipates her maternal destiny even earlier in the poem, when in Book 3 he compares her to a mother lamenting the death of her children, as if her future infanticide were already inscribed in the moment of infatuation (3.744-51): νὺξ μὲν ἔπειτ᾿ ἐπὶ γαῖαν ἄγεν κνέφας· οἱ δ᾿ ἐνὶπόντῳ ναυτίλοι εἰς Ἑλίκην τε καὶ ἀστέρας Ὠρίωνος ἔδρακον ἐκ νηῶν, ὕπνοιο δὲ καί τις ὁδίτης ἤδη καὶ πυλαωρὸς ἐέλδετο, καί τινα παίδων μητέρα τεθνεώτων ἀδινὸν περὶ κῶμ᾿ ἐκάλυπτεν· οὐδὲ κυνῶν ὑλακὴ ἔτ᾿ ἀνὰ πτόλιν, οὐ θρόος ἦεν ἠχήεις· σιγὴ δὲ μελαινομένην ἔχεν ὄρφνην. ἀλλὰ μάλ᾿ οὐ Μήδειαν ἐπὶ γλυκερὸς λάβεν ὕπνος·

Night then drew darkness across the earth; on the sea, sailors turned their eyes from their ships to Helice and the stars of Orion, and both the traveler on the road and the doorkeeper were already longing for sleep; and deep sleep surrounded the mother of children

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who have died. Nor was there the barking of dogs any longer through the city, no resounding noise; silence held the blackening darkness. But indeed sweet sleep did not yet possess Medea . . .

12 The childless Medea, whether virgin or infanticide, is rendered exceptional by her ability to transcend the narrative limits that are usually imposed on female experience in myth; accordingly, Apollonius suggests that, while not yet an epic figure, his Medea already possesses a narrative future that will make her part of the eternal world of epic. In moving from tragedy to epic, and from the role of wife and mother to that of marriageable virgin (and vice versa), Apollonius’ Medea hints at an inexhaustible capacity to give birth, by means of a sort of narrative parthenogenesis, to numerous offspring in her image.

13 This unceasing generative ability comes to fulfillment in Ovid, who—like Medea herself —transgresses the boundaries of literary genres and so, metapoetically speaking, “gives birth” to multiple Medeas. For Ovid, Medea’s infanticide makes her a byword for transgression—transgression that Ovid cleverly adapts to the subversive genre of erotic elegy.21 Her repeated appearances in Ovid’s elegiac poetry both conform to elegiac conventions and experiment with rejecting them. Abandoned by Jason, Medea is the elegiac lover par excellence; at the same time, she assumes a role normally played by men, enslaved by their puellae and tormented by a love that is not reciprocal. 22 When we read her monologue in Heroides 12, for example, we find her in the grip of grief and anger as she realizes that she has been abandoned. Medea takes advantage of the elegiac form of the epistle, exploiting it in order to portray herself as a defenseless victim.23 In fact, she claims that, even after her deployment of magical arts in Jason’s defense, she has lost her usual expertise (Her. 12.163-66): serpentes igitur potui taurosque furentes, unum non potui perdomuisse uirum; quaeque feros pepuli doctis medicatibus ignes, non ualeo flammas effugere ipsa meas.

I was able to tame snakes and wild bulls; I could not tame this man alone. I who repelled wild flames with my learned potions am unable myself to flee the flames of my passion.

14 Medea’s inability to protect herself recalls the lament of Catullus, seeking relief from the disease caused by amatory betrayal (76.7-8).24 In Medea’s case, of course, no external source of medicina would appear to be necessary;25 nonetheless, she recognizes the inability of her magic unguents to make her invulnerable to the fire of love (Her. 12.168), and instead assumes the role of a thwarted victim.26 She also does not exploit her divine heritage to assert physical and emotional control over Jason. While Euripides portrays Medea as something other than a typical woman in love, especially when she effectively appears as a dea ex machina in the final scene of the play, for both Apollonius in the Argonautica and Ovid in Heroides 12 she is for all intents and purposes mortal. Like Apollonius before him, Ovid exploits Medea’s feminine gender in all its presumed weakness, timidity, and impressionability to provoke our sympathy for her. Ovid articulates Medea’s situation in terms that recall other women first loved and then abandoned—women whose situation merges that of the controlling dominae of elegy27 with that of the tragically abandoned reginae of epic and epyllion, especially Catullus’ Ariadne and Virgil’s Dido—foreign women, who in betraying their families

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provide the men who abandon them with a convenient justification for their actions. This Medea represents herself in her apparent powerlessness as suited to the genre of elegy.

15 A crucial component in Ovid’s construction of Medea as an elegiac character is the almost complete absence of her children from her monologue until past its midpoint. Elegiac characters do not, for all intents and purposes, have families; marriage itself is an inconvenience in the elegiac world, of value only as representative of a social norm that must be violated.28 Of course, many of the characters whose voices are heard in the Heroides address their letters to an absent spouse or would-be spouse, including the most paradigmatically faithful wife of all, Penelope (Heroides 1); but the repeated pattern of a partner’s absence, with its intimations of forgetfulness and/or betrayal, insures that the women whose letters we read are consigned by their shared abandonment to a permanent elegiac condition. Children are even less congenial to the world of elegy than are husbands, symbolizing as they do an ideological stability of sex and gender roles.29 In the story of Medea, however, children are clearly essential, as they provide the means for her revenge against Jason; their importance in signifying her maternity—and so, the shock-value of infanticide—is underscored in Euripides’ play when Medea appears aloft in the exodos, the two corpses at her feet (Med. 1314-22). Ovid, on the other hand, draws attention to their existence primarily through dark and ironic allusions; unlike a tragedy, the letter denies them a physical presence. He thus manages both to sustain her elegiac portrait and to develop an unfulfilled sense of foreboding that delays indefinitely her tragic action.

16 The allusions to the children by Ovid’s Medea are both pathetic and calculating. At Her. 12.135-36, she combines an allusion to her exile with the first explicit mention of her companions, the two children, and so ironically echoes her departure with the children’s bodies in the chariot as enacted in the Euripidean exodos. Ovid revises the Euripidean scene, however, with a detail that is both grotesque and, at least in elegiac terms, a cliché, by giving her a third companion, amor—or, as Federica Bessone suggests, Amor, a familiar personification from elegy30: “at your command I withdrew from the house in the company of the two children and of my love for you, which attends me always” (iussa domo cessi natis comitata duobus | et, qui me sequitur semper, (A)more tui). The pathos aroused by Medea’s allusion to exile continues as she recalls how she learned about Jason’s impending marriage to Creusa, her willful ignorance forcefully dispelled when the younger of her two children observes the bridal procession (147-52)31: me quoque, quidquid erat, potius nescire iuuabat; sed tamquam scirem, mens mea tristis erat, cum minor e pueris, iussus studioque uidendi, constitit ad geminae limina prima foris: hinc mihi ‘mater, adi! pompam pater’ inquit ‘Iason ducit et adiunctos aureus urget equos!’

For me too it was preferable not to know whatever it was; but as if I did know, my mind was in mourning, when the younger of the children, eager to see and ordered to do so, took a stand right at the threshold of the double doors. From here he said to me, “Come, mother! My father Jason, all in gold, is leading a procession and is driving a team of horses!”

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17 The vivid recollection by the mother of her child’s innocent words, together with her specification that the speaker was the younger of the two, underscores both her maternal instincts and her isolation—she, and we, know what must happen; the child, on the other hand, does not.

18 Medea’s tenderness as a mother—and simultaneously, the vulnerability of the children —becomes most explicit as she approaches the end of her letter to Jason with a lament for their lost love (187-92, 197-98): si tibi sum uilis, communes respice natos: saeuiet in partus dira nouerca meos. et nimium similes tibi sunt, et imagine tangor, et, quotiens uideo, lumina nostra madent. per superos oro, per auitae lumina flammae, per meritum et natos, pignora nostra, duos: * * * * * * * te peto, quem merui, quem nobis ipse dedisti, cum quo sum pariter facta parente parens.

If I am of no value to you, at least consider the children we share: a wicked stepmother will rage against my offspring. They are too much like you! I am touched by the image, and as often as I see them, my eyes grow wet. By the gods above, by the light of my grandfather’s flame, by my service to you and by the two children, symbols of our shared trust: * * * * * * * I ask for you, you on whose gratitude I have earned a claim, you who gave yourself to me, you with whom I share the role of parent.

19 Medea’s loss and his betrayal are given immediacy through the physical existence of their children, embodiments of Jason’s lack of faith and of the risk his betrayal entails. Medea uses the existence of the children as manifestations of the pathetic condition in which she now finds herself, even as, through a kind of “double-speak,” her words hint at a violent rupture.32 Particularly ironic is her reference to a cruel stepmother (dira nouerca),33 implying that Creusa will harm the children: Medea thus draws explicit attention to the potential destructiveness of an alternative maternal figure even as she calls herself parens while approaching the end of both the letter and her identity as mother.34

20 Before we proceed to the end of the letter, however, let us glance back at its beginning. The rhetorically abrupt and even argumentative opening of the poem brings the reader up short: “But in fact, I recall, as queen of the Colchians I was available to you …” (At tibi Colchorum, memini, regina uacaui, Her. 12.1). Struck by the use of at as the first word in Medea’s letter, scholars have regularly noted the intertextual echo here of the first line of Aeneid 4, where Dido yields to her desire for Aeneas and is then betrayed by him: “But in fact, the queen, for some time now wounded by intense desire …” (At regina graui iamdudum saucia cura).35 The force of this intertextual link can be seen to extend even further, however: the word regina is a strange way for Ovid to refer to Medea, and an even stranger way for her to refer to herself, since in fact she is not, and never was, the queen of Colchis; to be precise, she is first the daughter of a king and later the partner of a would-be king, rejected by the latter when the woman who could in fact become his queen arrives on the scene. The broad sense in which the word regina is used here looks back not only to Dido but to another Virgilian model, appearing in the

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context of a description of the scene on the doors of the temple of Apollo at Delphi. They are the handiwork of Daedalus, who uses them to depict some of his earlier achievements, especially those on Crete: the ecphrastic description of these doors evokes both Daedalus’ labyrinth and Theseus’ battle with the Minotaur, and the illicit desires of two women are an essential part of the two narratives thus juxtaposed: “But pitying indeed the great love of the queen …” (magnum reginae sed enim miseratus amorem, Aen. 6.28). Because Daedalus’ handiwork involves two related but distinct episodes, Virgil’s allusion to “the love of a queen” as an inspiration for Daedalus contains a studied ambiguity: is Daedalus thinking of Pasiphaë, the queen of Crete, or of her daughter Ariadne, not yet a queen herself but her mother’s legitimate heir?36 When Ovid’s Medea uses the word regina to describe herself, then, she evokes a virtual genealogical paradigm that locates her on a literary map;37 and with the word “memini,” she makes explicit a knowing and self-reflexive echo of her literary models.38 These models also confirm the generic transformation Ovid has effected in introducing Medea into the Heroides: like them, she embodies the conflicting values of epic and elegy.

21 Her opening allusion to memory reminds Ovid’s reader that Medea has a past in other literary contexts; conversely, at the close of her letter, several features prefigure her future, and in so doing they signal the impossibility of closure that her generic transformation entails. In Medea’s final three couplets, the rhetorical device of aposiopesis, the use of the future tense, and the imagery of birth39 all mark the incompleteness of the action (207-12): quos equidem actutum—sed quid praedicere poenam attinet? ingentis parturit ira minas. quo feret ira, sequar! facti fortasse pigebit— et piget infido consuluisse uiro. uiderit ista deus, qui nunc mea pectora uersat! nescio quid certe mens mea maius agit!

Indeed, soon – but what is the use of proclaiming the punishment beforehand? My wrath is pregnant with enormous threats. Where wrath leads I shall follow! perhaps I will regret the act— even now I regret having looked after the interests of a faithless man. Let the god who now causes turmoil in my heart see to it! Something greater, surely, my mind intends!

22 Medea is just beginning to hint at the revenge she intends for the members of Jason’s new family, but now she interrupts herself mid-sentence (quos equidem actutum—, 207). Aposiopesis allows Medea to leave unsaid a crucial detail in the sequence of events: quos refers to Creon and Creusa, as well as to Jason himself—in other words, to the objects of her vengeance both past and future. It is also a strikingly dramatic effect; this is a theatrical statement, not the carefully chosen language of a text intended to be read.40 The evocation of drama thus created is reinforced by her use of the word actutum, fundamentally a marker of archaic Roman tragic language.41 Its appearance at this climactic moment gestures to her theatrical altera ego, both in Euripides (and his successors) and in Ovid. The pointed interest Ovid shows here in the timing of the letter’s conclusion reinforces the sense that Medea’s story is far from over: a combination of verbs in the future tense (feret; sequar; pigebit) and of words and expressions that encourage her readers to expect a continuation of the action (praedicere; parturit; uiderit; nescio quid … maius) make this letter a prelude rather than a denouement to her fulfillment of a heroic destiny.

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23 Medea is a misfit as an elegiac puella, then, in spite of her familiarity with the conventions of the genre; she uses the close of her letter, therefore, to look forward to a more elevated destiny, as a figure of tragedy or of epic. But even in these genres, as she knows, her gender limits her; roles like that of Penelope or even Antigone cannot contain her aspirations. In the final lines of her letter, therefore, Medea anticipates a new kind of self, that will liberate her from the burden of maternity and that will bring her poetic immortality. The periphrasis nescio quid … maius in the final line occurs on one other occasion in Augustan poetry, in Propertius’ description of Virgil’s forthcoming epic poem, not yet complete but destined to be greater than the Iliad itself: “make way, Roman writers! Make way, Greeks! | something greater than the Iliad is being born” (cedite Romani scriptores, cedite Grai! | nescioquid maius nascitur Iliade, Prop. 2.34.66).42 Hardie has identified “the end that is also a beginning” as a typical characteristic of the totalizing tendency of epic narrative, particularly evident in Virgil, whose Aeneid begins with the end of the Trojan War and ends with the eternal destiny of Rome.43 With her concluding promise of “something greater” (nescioquid maius), Ovid’s Medea foresees an epic narrative in which, upon killing her children, she will begin her heroic career.44 As she steels herself and us for her passage from word to action (agit, 212), she also redefines what it means to give birth: whereas Propertius had alluded to the impending arrival of the Aeneid with an impersonal, almost abstract use of the image of birth (nascitur), Ovid uses the image in a terrifyingly aggressive way: for Medea, giving birth is the result of wrath, ira—a telling echo of the first word of the Iliad; in turn, wrath’s natural offspring are not human children, but great threats of force: ingentis ira parturit minas (208).45 The elegiac Medea knows that when her threats are carried out, she will be childless, and ready to enter the company of heroes. She has also prepared herself—and us—to rupture the strictures of elegy and to assume a central role in the world of epic.

IV. Becoming Medea

24 The Medea who emerges from Heroides 12 dominates the first half of Book 7 of the Metamorphoses.46 Many scholars have detailed both the dramatic character of this Medea and her indebtedness to that of Apollonius, and have noted her dependence on the treacherous women, later abandoned, of earlier Latin literature, especially Ariadne and Dido.47 The Medea of the Metamorphoses, however, both combines and confounds the categories of literary genre: she combines elements of epic and tragedy along with remnants of her elegiac past, and the emotional torment felt by her character— especially her dilemma regarding the respective merits of rectum, pietas, and pudor (Met. 7.72)48 on the one hand and on passion, ardor (7.76), on the other49—places this generic confusion center-stage. Should we consider Medea a victor, or a victim? And which of these roles should she choose for herself? Should she destroy others, or destroy herself? These questions in turn suggest how Medea’s challenge to the limits of genre entails a second challenge, to the limits of gender. Both pudor and ardor are typical, even predictable, manifestations of emotion in a young girl overpowered by desire; rectum, on the other hand, is profoundly moralizing,50 and pietas is a “buzzword” that evokes first and foremost the masculine world of epic values, especially for a public raised on the Aeneid.51 The internal conflict that stirs Medea is precisely the same as that which torments Aeneas when he debates the merits of civic and social obligations

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on the one hand and of personal desire on the other, although in Medea’s case even her sense of obligation is fundamentally personal. The very fact of her centrality in the narrative of the Metamorphoses endows her with a degree of epic masculinity; following in Apollonius’ footsteps, furthermore, Ovid has downplayed the role of Jason in this episode almost to the vanishing point. And even when we do see him, we see him through the eyes of Medea; she is the character around whom the story revolves.

25 Apart from discussing Apollonius’ role in determining the shape of Ovid’s narrative, scholars usually comment on the virtual invisibility in the Metamorphoses of Medea’s most famous, and infamous, act, the infanticide; in the first half of the book (7.1-424), centered entirely on Medea, the episode at Corinth is reduced to a four-line summary near the end of the story (7.394-97)52: sed postquam Colchis arsit noua nupta uenenis flagrantemque domum regis mare uidit utrumque, sanguine natorum perfunditur impius ensis, ultaque se male mater Iasonis effugit arma.

But after the new bride blazed with Colchian potions and the sea on each side of Corinth witnessed the burning house of the king, the criminal sword is bathed in the blood of the children, and having avenged herself evilly the mother fled from Jason’s weapons.

26 This summary is reasonably faithful to the plot of Euripides’ play, aside from the burning palace of Creon, an added detail that expands upon the allusion in the preceding line to the “burning” of Jason’s new bride (arsit). The second two verses in particular offer an exceptionally succinct review of the action, with virtually every word contributing to a rehearsal of Euripides’ exodos; the dead children come first in 396, followed by the weapon of their destruction; and 397 begins with revenge (ulta) and ends with the flight from Jason (Iasonis effugit arma). On this last line of the four, commentators generally note that the adverb male should be construed with the participle ulta (and I have done so in my translation);53 but, as E.J. Kenney remarks, “the order of the words suggests that male refers also to mater … ‘a denaturalized mother.’”54 Kenney’s comment points to a fundamental paradox in the story itself: with her children dead, Medea, their mother, is a mother no longer; the normal (i.e., stereotypical) course of affairs, in which children are raised and protected by their mothers so that they can eventually step into the parental role themselves, has been replaced by a narrative—the surrounding narrative in Metamorphoses 7—in which Medea carries out an act of revenge that resembles a sort of epic masculinity even as she reverses narrative time by returning to the status of a childless woman.

27 The temporal disharmony of the Medea episode takes several forms. While the superficial narrative proceeds in reasonably straightforward manner (i.e., from Colchis to Athens, with all the usual intermediate stops), the theme of this narrative is repetitive and redundant.55 Medea repeatedly calls on Hecate (74-75, 94-95, 174-78, 194-95, 241); she travels repeatedly (220-37, 350-93; 398-402); she puts her magic, often destructive, always disturbing, to work on numerous occasions (98-99, 115-16, 137-38, 149-53, 189-91, 199-206, 238-50, 257-78, 312-21, 326-30). And just as she escapes from Corinth and Jason at 7.397 (effugit), so she escapes a second time from Athens and Aegeus at 7.424 (effugit)—and simultaneously, from Ovid’s poem, as this escape is the last thing we hear about Medea in the Metamorphoses.56 It should come as no surprise, then, that this final escape is made possible through carmina: “she fled the murder in

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clouds stirred by her magic” (effugit illa necem nebulis per carmina motis), in a play on words that glances, but with the utmost subtlety, at an equation between the sorcerer Medea and the poet Ovid: her magic is also his.57

28 But repetition is not the only form of temporal interference in this episode; far more striking is the temporal reversal effected by Medea’s magic, especially when she agrees with Jason’s request to rejuvenate Aeson, a procedure described by Ovid in elaborate detail (159-293). At first Jason suggests a zero-sum intervention, asking her to take some years from him and give them to his father instead (164-68). The fungibility of time thus proposed is rejected by Medea, who refers to the idea as “a crime” (scelus, 172) and so implies that such an exercise of her skills is anathema to her; instead, she proposes to ask Hecate for help in effecting the rejuvenation of Aeson as a gift to Jason (176-78). The first real suggestion she gives of her ability to interfere with linear time, however, appears only in her nighttime prayer to Hecate and all the other divinities of night, in the list of otherworldly accomplishments made possible with their help: she can make rivers reverse their natural course and return to their source (199-200).58 This reversal of the natural order of things becomes fully realized after she seeks out the plants and roots that she will use for her potion, and performs an elaborate ritual sacrifice involving these materials and many others (stones, owls’ wings, the innards of a werewolf, a deer’s liver, and the heads and beaks of old crows, among other things); the end result, after a successful demonstration of her powers with the rejuvenation of an olive branch (279-84), is the rebirth of Aeson as a young man, strong and handsome, reminiscent of the man he was forty years earlier (287-93): … quos postquam combibit Aeson aut ore acceptos aut uulnere, barba comaeque canitie posita nigrum rapuere colorem, pulsa fugit macies, abeunt pallorque situsque, adiectoque cauae supplentur corpore rugae, membraque luxuriant. Aeson miratur et olim ante quater denos hunc se reminiscitur annos.

After Aeson had drunk down these things, taken in either by mouth or by the open wound, his beard and his hair lost their whiteness and took on a black color, his thinness, beaten off, flees, his pallor and old age depart, his deep wrinkles are filled with added flesh, and his limbs flourish. Aeson marvels, and recalls his own self like this from forty years ago.

29 In referring to Aeson as he looked forty years earlier, Ovid is explicit about the temporal reversal effected by Medea; simultaneously, Ovid demonstrates his own ability to play with time, presenting Medea’s preparations first of all in painstaking detail and extending over more than 100 verses, and then speeding up the narrative so that Aeson’s rejuvenation seems to occur “in the blink of an eye,” as Kenney notes.59 And as time seems to expand or contract, or even to reverse itself, at the behest of Medea (and of her poet, Ovid), a stray detail in the narrative invites reconsideration. In her journey to find a variety of plants and roots, Medea had used her snake-drawn chariot—the same vehicle with which, in “future reflexive” terms,60 she has not yet escaped from Corinth (the infanticide is yet to occur) but which looks back to Euripides’ deus ex machina; and these snakes, old as they are, are rejuvenated by the fragrance of Medea’s gatherings61 and so shed their skin: “nor were the snakes touched except by

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the odor, and yet they still shed the ancient skin of their old age” (neque erant tacti nisi odore dracones, | et tamen annosae pellem posuere senectae, Met. 7.236-37).

30 Medea has mastered both linear and narrative time, a mastery to which Euripides’ Medea laid claim when she killed her children and fled in order to begin anew. In their rejuvenated condition, these snakes are manifestations of her power, almost extensions of her, prepared to fly into the future—a future beyond the gendered limits of maternity. In turn, these snakes prove their usefulness to Medea yet again when, after promising the daughters of Pelias that she will repeat her magic to rejuvenate their father, she instead turns the daughters into patricides (297-349). Their murderous actions, narrated in gruesome detail, ironically reverse Medea’s infanticide, still to come in Ovid’s narrative;62 and as she will then, now too she escapes with the help of the snakes: “But unless she had departed into the air with her winged snakes, she would not have been free from punishment” (quod nisi pennatis serpentibus isset in auras, | non exempta foret poenae, 350-51).

31 The correspondence between Medea’s power over narrative time and her infanticide liberates her from the strictures and constraints of motherhood; it does not, however, limit her ability to reproduce—but the form of reproduction she claims for herself adds to her power, rather than limiting it. The imagery of reproduction takes on physical form in Ovid’s description of Jason’s triumphant acquisition of the golden fleece, made possible by Medea’s creation of medicamina (7.116) that protect Jason from the fire- breathing bulls that bar access to the fleece. After their defeat, Jason faces a second challenge: he must sow serpents’ teeth in the ground and confront the resulting crop of armed warriors. The emergence of these men from the earth is compared by Ovid to the birth of an infant from its mother’s womb (7.123-30): semina mollit humus ualido praetincta ueneno et crescunt fiuntque sati noua corpora dentes; utque hominis speciem materna sumit in aluo perque suos intus numeros componitur infans nec nisi maturus communes exit in auras, sic ubi uisceribus grauidae telluris imago effecta est hominis, feto consurgit in aruo, quodque magis mirum est, simul edita concutit arma.

The earth softens the seeds pretreated with a strong potion, and once sown, the teeth grow and become new bodies; and just as an infant takes on the appearance of a human in his mother’s womb and is completed in every detail and does not emerge into the shared breezes until he is ready, thus, when the image of a human was created in the womb of the pregnant earth, it rose up in the productive field, and, even more amazing, it immediately brandished the weapons thereby produced.

32 The mythical trope that makes Earth a mother and the sexual stereotype that imagines intercourse between a male and a female as analogous to plowing and sowing a field are both combined and inverted here63: plowed and sown (aratos spargit in agros, 122), the soil softens and germinates the seeds to which Medea has applied an ointment; and, just as an infant develops in its mother’s womb and emerges at maturity, so images of men rise up from the impregnated soil—and brandish weapons.

33 Medea herself grows pale at the thought of what these “children” could do to Jason: “as she saw the youth, all alone, being attacked by so many enemies, she grew pale and sat,

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chilled and with the blood drained suddenly from her face” (utque peti uidit iuuenem tot ab hostibus unum, | palluit et subito sine sanguine frigida sedit, 7.135-36), and so adds an additional charm (carmen | auxiliare, 137-38) to her powerful magic; it is precisely this that leads to Jason’s triumph. Within a few more verses, the “earthborn brothers” (terrigenae fratres, 141), having turned their weapons against each other in civil strife, fall in the line of battle. Medea thus goes from momentary weakness to a repetition of her powerful magic, using her carmen to bring about the killing of the newborn warriors by Jason, and so to ensure both the continuation of her story and the inevitable infanticide that awaits. This action not only repeats the earlier use of magic in this episode but also sends us back to Medea’s first infanticide, in Euripides, in an unending cycle of destruction and creativity. Ovid’s epic Medea is forever and always becoming the transcendent character she is destined to be, although not even epic can wholly contain Medea.

V. Medea’s Impossibility

34 In Ovid’s Medea, creative and destructive powers go hand in hand. The magic through which she can invert or reverse the course of nature is the possession that allows her to control time itself; her rejuvenation of Aeson, and the accompanying rejuvenation of her snakes, are unmistakable doublets for her own renewal. Likewise, her children are essential to her self-definition, since they alone enable her to embody a living oxymoron, the childless mother whose deeds and accomplishments permit her to transcend the gendered world of elegy and embark upon an epic career. Medea’s fertile maternity is key to her survival; indeed, it constitutes her assertion of immortality. And her survival, both in and outside of texts, suggests that through a combination of temporal and ideological reversals, a determined striving for nescioquid … maius, and the power of carmen itself, the adunaton imagined by the chorus of Corinthian women in the first stasimon of Euripides’ play has been transformed into the possible. Ovid suggests that Medea herself is the embodiment of “a new genre of poetry” imagined by Zeitlin and detected by Hopman64 in the conclusion of Euripides’ play—not however as revenge tragedy suited to women, and not even as an elegiac woman, but as an otherwise impossible instantiation of epic in the feminine voice, regenerating itself on end.

35 Of course, it goes without saying that Medea’s gendered claim to epic stature is not unproblematic: in a genre that can be defined, as Ennius says, as maxima facta patrum (Epigr. 45 Courtney),65 the infanticide of Medea is in perennial conflict with the ideology of continuity that sustains heroic epic. When Ennius refers to the protagonists of epic as patres, he acknowledges the obvious significance of succession in the formation of epic narrative; but when Ovid’s Medea acts in epic, she creates, if only for a brief time, a very different type of poetry, focusing not on succession but on the violent annihilation of all around her as a means to achieve her own rebirth. Yet in the final analysis, the poetic world that Medea inhabits is as irretrievable as is her desire for heroic stature: her abrupt escape from Metamorphoses 7 (at 424, quoted above) takes both her and us into the unknown, a place in which to imagine a new genre that validates Medea’s gender. As for Ovid, however, so for us: the route that grants access to this terrain leads only to uncharted territory.66

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______, ed. 1997. P. Ovidius Naso, Der XII. Heroidenbrief: Medea an Jason. Mit einer Beilage: Die Fragmente der Tragödie Medea. Leiden: Brill.

Hinds, S.E. 1993. “Medea in Ovid: Scenes from the Life of an Intertextual Heroine.” MD 30: 9-47.

______. 2011. “Seneca’s Ovidian Loci.” SIFC 9: 5-63.

Hopman, M. 2008. “Revenge and Mythopoiesis in Euripides’ Medea.” TAPA 138: 155-83.

Hunter, R.L., ed. 1989. Apollonius of Rhodes: Argonautica Book III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jacobson, H. 1974. Ovid’s Heroides. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

James, S. 2003. Learned Girls and Male Persuasion. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Keith, A. 2000. Engendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kennedy, D.F. 2012. “Love’s Tropes and Figures.” In B.K. Gold, ed., A Companion to Roman Love Elegy, 189-203. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Kenney, E.J. 2001. “Est deus in nobis: Medea Meets her Maker.” In T.D. Papanghelis and A. Rengakos, eds., A Companion to Apollonius Rhodius, 261-83. Leiden: Brill.

______, ed. 2011. Ovidio, Metamorfosi: Volume IV (Libri VII-IX). Milan: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla.

Knox, B.M.W. 1977. “The Medea of Euripides.” YCS 25: 193-225.

Knox, P. 1986a. “Ovid’s Medea and the Authenticity of Heroides 12.” HSCP 90: 207-23.

______. 1986b. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Traditions of Augustan Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society.

Lefkowitz, M. 2007. Women in Greek Myth. 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Lindheim, S.H. 2003. Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid’s Heroides. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Loraux, N. 1993. The Children of Athena. Trans. C. Levine. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Manuwald, G. 2013. “Medea: Transformations of a Greek Figure in Latin Literature.” G&R 60: 114-35.

Martina, A., ed. 2018. Euripide, Medea. Three volumes. Pisa: Fabrizio Serra Editore.

Mastronarde, D.J., ed. 2002. Euripides: Medea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McAuley, M. 2016. Reproducing Rome: Motherhood in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, and Statius. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Miller, J. 1993. “Ovidian Allusion and the Vocabulary of Memory.” MD 30: 153-64.

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Newlands, C.E. 1997. “The Metamorphosis of Ovid’s Medea.” In J.J. Clauss and S.I. Johnston, eds., Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art, 178-208. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Petersen, L.H. and P. Salzman-Mitchell. 2012. “Introduction: The Public and Private Faces of Mothering and Motherhood in Classical Antiquity.” In L.H. Petersen and P. Salzman-Mitchell, eds., Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome, 1-22. Austin, TX : University of Texas Press.

Quint, D. 1991. “Repetition and Ideology in the Aeneid.” MD 24: 9-54.

Ricks, C. 1976. “Allusion: The Poet as Heir.” In R.F. Brissenden and J.C. Eade, eds., Studies in the Eighteenth Century, III, 209-40. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Rosati, G. 1988. “Il parto maledetto di Medea (Ovidio, Her. 6, 156 s.).” MD 21: 305-9.

______. 1990. “Note al testo delle Heroides.” MD 24: 161-79.

Schmitzer, U. 2003. “Ovid und seine Medea.” In R. Kussl, ed., Spurensuche, 21-48. Munich: Bayerischer Schulbuch Verlag.

Sharrock, A. 1994. Seduction and Repetition in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria II. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Spoth, F. 1992. Ovids Heroides als Elegien. Munich: C.H. Beck.

Trinacty, C. 2007. “Seneca’s Heroides: Elegy in Seneca’s Medea.” CJ 103: 63-78.

Visser, M. 1986. “Medea: Daughter, Sister, Wife, Mother. Natal Family versus Conjugal Family in Greek and Roman Myths about Women.” In M. Cropp, E. Fantham, and S.E. Scully, eds., Greek Tragedy and its Legacy: Essays Presented to D.J. Conacher, 149-65. Calgary: University of Calgary Press.

Williams, G. 2010. “Apollo, Aesculapius and the Poetics of Illness in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.” PLLS 14: 63-92.

______. 2012. “Medea in Metamorphoses 7: Magic, Moreness and the Maius Opus.” Ramus 41: 49-70.

Wofford, S. 1992. The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Zeitlin, F.I. 1996. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

NOTES

1. See Mastronarde 2002 on 419-24; Martina 2018, vol. 3 on 419-30. As both commentators remark, the chorus’ claim of poetic misogyny overlooks the distinguished female poets whose names and works would have been known to the Athenian audience, but the generalizing stereotype nonetheless holds true. More generally on Hesiod and Semonides on women, see Loraux 1993: 72-110. 2. Zeitlin 1996: 348; cf. B.M.W. Knox 1977: 223 on the radical nature of this chorus. 3. Hopman 2008. 4. Hopman 2008: 180. 5. Hopman 2008: 175-80 makes a strong case for reading the Oresteia as an intertext for Euripides’ play, providing a model for the perfect tragic revenge plot.

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6. The two verses are fr. 1, seruare potui, perdere an possim, rogas? (Quint. IO 8.5.6) and fr. 2, feror huc illuc, uae, plena deo (Sen. Suas. 3.5-7). See Heinze 1997: 221-52 for a discussion of the fragments and hypothetical reconstruction of the play; also Curley 2013: 41-43. 7. Curley 2013: 37-58 argues that Ovid must have written the Medea immediately after completing the Amores, and that he went on to the Heroides only thereafter; he reads these epistolary poems as an experiment with how to combine tragic and elegiac features in a new form. While his argument is ingenious, it is also highly speculative. Since the focus of this essay does not depend on the relative chronology of Ovid’s works, I refrain from discussing Curley’s theory further here. I also note that Heroides 12 has been the subject of periodic challenges to its authenticity: see P. Knox 1986a; also Heinze 1991-93. While Knox’ discussion contains many valuable observations about the diction and style of the poem, I am convinced by more recent studies that this poem is very likely to be the work of Ovid, and I will treat it as such in this essay. 8. On the importance of Ovidian repetition, see now Fulkerson and Stover 2016 and Boyd 2017: 8-10, 213-15. For a survey of the many Medeas in Latin literature, see Boyle 2012, Manuwald 2013, and Martina 2018, vol. 1: 83-107. 9. See Mastronarde 2002 and Martina 2018, vol. 3, ad loc. 10. B.M.W. Knox 1977 and Easterling 1977 have shaped subsequent scholarship on the character of Medea and the interpretation of the play generally; cf., e.g., Zeitlin 1996: 60 and 348; Foley 2001: 257-68 on Medea’s “divided self”; Mastronarde 2002: 36 on “Medea’s appropriation of masculine values”; and Martina 2018, vol. 1: 219-21 on “lo status mascolino di Medea.” 11. Cf. Wofford 1992: 7: “From the Iliad on, the disjunction between the represented action of characters in epic . . . and the figurative claims made about that action by the poet becomes a defining feature of epic poetry, bringing to the epic an ideological and moral ambivalence that comes from its simultaneous articulation of two contrasting claims about the value of heroic action (as each poem defines it).” 12. Hardie 1993, following Ricks 1976. See now also Boyd 2017: 75-180 on Ovid’s appropriation of the paternity trope. 13. On the cultural significance of family and marriage in other versions of the story of Medea, see Visser 1986 and Guastella 2001; for a broader reading of the topic and its Roman implications, see McAuley 2016: 139-42. 14. See Mastronarde 2002: 30, 38-40 on the staging of this scene. 15. Hopman 2008: 175-80; the quoted phrase is from 176. 16. Barchiesi 1993: 334: “But what happens when the older [literary] tradition enters a new text as a view of the future? … The literary tradition—a source of power, control, and anxiety, a perfect analogy for the past in everyone’s life—is now displaced, and a potential for irony opens up.” 17. Trinacty 2007 and Battistella 2015: 447-48 expand upon this theme as developed by Seneca, following Ovid; see also McAuley 2016: 207-27. 18. On Greek mothers, Demand 1994 remains the most comprehensive study in English. See also Visser 1986; Loraux 1993; Petersen and Salzman-Mitchell 2012; cf. also Lefkowitz 2007:106-21 on the mythological portrayal of “the woman without men.” On Roman mothers as depicted in literature, see now McAuley 2016. 19. For an exploration from a Kristevan perspective that focuses on Roman love elegy of the associations between and among time, gender, and genre, see now Gardner 2013: 145-80 on repetition and cyclicality (as opposed to the linear imperative of epic narrative) as characteristic of “women’s time.” 20. Hunter 1989: 21 and 32-38 offers a useful overview. 21. Numerous allusions to Medea occur en passant in the elegiac poetry of Ovid. In these glances at her story, she is typically depicted as a vindictive murderer of her own children; often, her name is omitted, a rhetorical strategy that confirms her literary celebrity: A.A. 1.336, nece

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natorum sanguinulenta parens (in a catalogue of crimes caused by feminine libido); A.A. 2.381-82, coniugis admissum uiolataque iura marita est | barbara per natos Phasias ulta suos (in a catalogue of betrayed women overpowered by wrath); Rem. 59-60, nec dolor armasset contra sua uiscera matrem,| quae socii damno sanguinis ulta uirum est (in a catalogue of women who have suffered for love); Am. 2.14.29, Colchida respersam puerorum sanguine culpant (in the context of Corinna’s abortion). Cf. also A.A. 2.101-3 (the inefficacy of magic in love); A.A. 3.333 (Jason has betrayed Medea, Phasida iam matrem); Rem. 261-62 (love is more powerful than Medea’s magic); Fasti 2.41-42 (Aegeus is deceived by Medea); Fasti 2.627 (a list of predecessors who have destroyed their families); Tr. 2.387-90 (a list of mythological love stories); Heroides 6 (Hypsipyle unknowingly foresees Medea’s infanticide); Tr. 3.9 (Apsyrtus’ murder provides the etymology for Tomi). Cf. also Schmitzer 2003. 22. For an overview of the elegiac cliché of seruitium amoris, see Fulkerson 2013. 23. See Spoth 1992: 198-205 on Heroides 12 as elegy; Bessone 1997: 11-41 offers a comprehensive overview of generic signposting in Heroides 12. 24. For further comparison of Catul. 76 and Her. 12, see Bessone 1995, and below, n. 38. Cf. also Binroth-Bank 1994: 54, Mastronarde 2002: 24-25, and Graf 1997: 28. 25. Cf. Pindar Py. 4.233: Medea is described as παμφάρμακος ξείνα. 26. The irony of her powerlessness in the face of love has a parallel in Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne in Metamorphoses 1. As the god of medicine, he has the ability to heal all wounds except those inflicted by Cupid (Met. 1.521-24). Apollo’s divinity, however, as well as his masculinity, makes his amorous suffering an insignificant rationale for sorrow; rather, his love will truly conquer all— including Daphne. Apollo is an incongruous elegiac lover, distancing himself entirely from the role when, with Daphne’s transformation into a tree, he succeeds in asserting his permanent power over the girl’s arboreal nature (1.557-67). At the close of the episode, Ovid signals the restoration of the epic code in the poem when he describes the healing god with the epithet Paean (1.566), a name synonymous with healing as early as the Homeric poems and gradually assimilated to Apollo himself: Graf 2009: 81-82. Prior to his infatuation with Daphne, Apollo had been busy maintaining order on earth; with the declaration that Daphne will live on in the form of the tree sacred to him, he simultaneously reaffirms the permanence of Augustan order, so abandoning a life of elegiac submission to the chaos of love and replacing it with a panegyric gesture. P. Knox 1986b: 14-18 provides a detailed discussion of Apollo as elegiac lover in this scene. See also Williams 2010 on the failure of Apollo in love, and Boyd 2016 and ead. 2017: 205-12 on the inefficacy of magic in the Circe episode of Rem. 249-90. 27. Again we see the inversion of the cliché of servitium amoris (above, n. 22). 28. See Gardner 2013: 8, 48-50. 29. James 2003: 173-83 discusses the problems posed in elegy by the prospect of pregnancy and childbirth; cf. Gardner 2013: 48 n. 52. 30. Bessone 1997 ad loc.; cf. Heinze 1997 ad loc. on the polyvalence of amor. 31. These verses present several textual problems; I follow here Bessone’s text, based in part on that of Rosati 1990: 165-70. See Bessone 1997 ad loc. for detailed discussion. Heinze 1997 prints essentially the same text, except for the variant studioue in 12.149: see his discussion ad loc. 32. On the duplicity or doubleness of Medea’s words in this section of the letter, see Bessone 1997 ad loc. 33. Jacobson 1974: 122 n. 32 observes that “these lines are rich in their pregnant implications.” Cf. also Her. 6.127-28: Hypsipyle describes Medea as “more than a stepmother” (Medeam timui: plus est Medea nouerca; | Medeae faciunt ad scelus omne manus). On the points of contact and interplay between Heroides 6 and 12, see Rosati 1988; Fulkerson 2005: 40-55; and cf. Lindheim 2003: 114-33. On the imagery of “moreness” in Heroides 12, see below, nn. 44 and 45. 34. As one of my anonymous referees observes, the phrase dira nouerca also functions as an instance of “double-speak” in regard to Medea herself, who in the sequel to this episode is the “wicked stepmother” of Theseus.

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35. See Jacobson 1974: 114 and n. 13; Hinds 1993: 45 and n. 80; Bessone 1997 ad loc.; and cf. also Heinze 1997 ad loc., noting Heinsius’ approval of this opening. 36. At Met. 7.21, Medea describes herself as regia uirgo; cf. Servius ad loc. for Virgil’s use of regina (regis filia: abusiue dicit more poetico), and for a summary of views, Casali 1995: 5-6 and n. 6. Casali makes a convincing case that the word regina in Aeneid 6 alludes (at least primarily) to Ariadne. 37. And, as one of the anonymous referees reminds me, the “virtual genealogical paradigm” also has a basis in mythological fact, for Medea is the niece of Pasiphaë, the sister of her father Aeetes (cf. Apoll. Argon. 3.1074-76). 38. Cf. Miller 1993 and Bessone 1997: 287-88 on the metaliterary effect of memini, etc.; also Bessone 1995 for the relationship between Catul. c. 76 and Ovid’s Medea, and for the suggestion (576 n. 6) that Medea’s ‘memini’ replies to Catullus’ opening words, ‘si qua recordanti …’. 39. Cf. Rosati 1988 on the imagery of childbirth used by Hypsipyle to allude to Medea at Her. 6.156-57. 40. Cf. Barchiesi 1993: 343: “Medea is passing from letter-writing to action—to scenic action.” 41. Barchiesi 1993: 343; Heinze 1997 ad loc.; Bessone 1997 ad loc. provides ample bibliography. Cf. also Spoth 1992: 198-205 and Hinds 1993: 40-43. 42. Propertius in turn is “quoting” Virgil, who uses the term maius opus to distinguish the second half of the Aeneid from the first (Aen. 7.45)—immediately after his invocation of the Muse Erato, the same Muse invoked by Apollonius in beginning his Medea-book: see Hunter 1989 on Argon. 3.1-5. 43. Hardie 1993: 11-14. 44. On the importance of achieving “something greater” for tragic and epic heroes, see Barchiesi 1993; Williams 2012. Hinds 2011: 22-28 examines the role of “greatness” in the intertextual and metatextual relationship between Ovid’s and Seneca’s Medeas; see also Battistella 2015. 45. Cf. Spoth 1992: 203, Barchiesi 1993: 344-45; Heinze 1997 on Her. 12.212; and Bessone 1997: 28-41, discussing the generic implications of literary-critical language concerning greatness. See also Hinds 1993: 41 for the suggestion of wordplay in the epithet ingentis and id. 2011: 22-25. 46. Newlands 1997: 178-92 sees the first section of the Medea episode in Metamorphoses 7 as a continuation of the character seen in Heroides 12 (viewed in a sympathetic light), but considers Medea’s “metamorphosis” into a witch, beginning at 7.159, to constitute “a cardboard figure of evil” (180). While Newlands’ observations regarding the metamorphosis of Medea are valuable, my discussion argues for a more complex understanding of Medea’s character. 47. Hinds 1993; Barchiesi 1993; Binroth-Bank 1994 gives details on both similarities and differences passim. 48. Printed with upper-case first letters by Tarrant 2004, followed by Kenney 2011. 49. Cf. Kenney 2011 on Met. 7.11-73. 50. OLD s.v. 10b. 51. Cf. Boyd 2017: 36-37 on Ovid’s use of the word pietas as shorthand for the Aeneid. 52. See Kenney 2011 ad loc. and id. 2001: 262: “the murder of her children[,] is alluded to almost casually in a way that represents her momentous sojourn in Corinth as hardly more than a brief stop-over in her devious aerial progress from Iolcus to Athens …”; and cf. Binroth-Bank 1994: 144-45, “Von der Existenz der Kinder erfahren wir erst im Augenblick ihres Todes.” 53. Bömer 1976 ad loc., Kenney 2011 ad loc. 54. Kenney 2011 ad loc.: “l’ordine delle parole suggerisce che male si riferisca anche a mater … ‘una madre snaturata.’” Interestingly, Ovid uses another instance of male + perfect passive participle at Her. 6.157, in a passage referring to the doomed children of Medea: nec male parta diu teneat peiusque relinquat. On the wordplay in this line, see Rosati 1988. 55. On repetition as an essential characteristic of epic narrative, cf. Hardie 1993: 14-18, following Quint 1991; see also above, n. 8. 56. See Kenney 2011 ad loc., and on Met. 7.404-24.

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57. On the polyvalence of carmen in Ovid, see Sharrock 1994: 63-64; and cf. now Boyd 2016: 111-12, 118-20 and ead. 2017: 206-7. For attractive observations about the metaliterary character of Medea in Metamorphoses 7, see Williams 2012: 62-67. 58. See Williams 2012: 55. 59. Kenney 2011 on Met. 7.285: “in contrasto con i lunghi elaborati preliminari il ringiovanimento in sé avviene ed è descritto in un battibaleno.” 60. See above, n. 16. 61. Bömer 1976 ad loc. and Kenney 2011 ad loc. note the probable allusion here by Ovid to the Rhizotomoi of Sophocles, as described by Macrobius Sat. 5.19.9. 62. On Medea’s “paradoxical” powers in this scene, Williams 2012: 58-59. 63. See Keith 2000: 36-41 on the imagery used for Mother Earth in Latin epic; and see duBois 1988: 39-85 for Greek agricultural metaphors for intercourse and the female body. Kenney 2011 ad loc. details the Lucretian flavor of the description. 64. Cf. the references to Zeitlin 1996 and Hopman 2008 in nn. 2 and 3, above. 65. Identified as fragment 2a of the Epigrams in Goldberg and Manuwald 2018. 66. Much earlier versions of a portion of this essay were delivered as talks at the Università di Bologna and the Università di Roma, Tor Vergata; I thank my hosts and listeners at both institutions for lively questions and conversation. I also thank Francesca Mencacci and Anna Maria Thornton for their help with turning this into Italian and back again. Last but not least, I am grateful to the anonymous readers for Dictynna, whose interventions helped me to sharpen and refine my discussion.

ABSTRACTS

This essay examines Ovid’s repeated use of the character and story of Medea, focusing on the phenomenon of repetition itself. Her appearances in Ovid’s poetry are not only self-referential but also metatextual, allowing Ovid to explore and to comment upon the generic parameters of his work and upon the possibility of creating something radically new.

INDEX

Keywords: Medea, repetition, infanticide, gender, genre

AUTHOR

BARBARA W. BOYD

Bowdoin College [email protected]

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The Shade of Orpheus : Ambiguity and the Poetics of Vmbra in Metamorphoses 10

Celia Campbell

1 In Book 10, the narrative reins of Ovid’s Metamorphoses are ceded to the constructed whims of a notable internal poet-singer : the mythical bard Orpheus. In this way, Orpheus follows in the footsteps of his mother, the Muse Calliope, who is granted a large portion of narrative space within Book 5, similarly occupying a pentadic structural point within the epic. These acts of internal narration are, however, not just linked structurally, nor by the loosely imposed idea of a continuity established through generational descent, but are affiliated through the circumstance of their staging. The communication of Calliope’s narrative is predicated on a poetic covenant familiarised by the pastoral tradition : the Muse asks her audience, the goddess Minerva, if she has sufficient leisure (otia, Met. 5.333) to listen to the song, to which the goddess replies affirmatively, and makes herself at home as a listener within the landscape (Pallas ait nemorisque leui consedit in umbra, ‘Pallas replied and settled herself within the lightly shaded grove’, 5.336). Her relaxed position in the shade (umbra) reveals her readiness to receive the song of the Muse.1 The song of Orpheus, too, is predicated upon the existence of shade, but the shade that provides cover for Orpheus’ song is fraught with a host of associations that transcend the positive overtones found in simple bucolic need : pastoral singers seek the available cover of shade, but Orpheus is no typical bucolic herdsman passing the time with pleasant intervals of song. Rather, the shade that he furnishes for himself with the grove he musically summons is an atmosphere of deep ambiguity. The grove of Orpheus provides the focal point of this discussion, which seeks to reorient the grove’s conceptualisation and interpretation as a poetic landscape, on two levels of significance : what it means to Orpheus, the internal narrator, and to Ovid, the epic poet. I suggest that the grove summoned is most productively understood as an atmospheric doublet of the Underworld, a landscape of liminality conjured by Orpheus in an effort to reproduce and regain imaginative access to his lost wife Eurydice. The creation of the grove as an earthly evocation of the

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Underworld is both made permissible and activated by the double meaning of umbra, denoting the shade of a tree or shade of the dead. While the construction of the grove under this atmospheric authority makes a landscape designed to accommodate and reflect the song Orpheus sings within its confines, the tree catalogue also represents Ovid’s metamorphosing of the epic topos of the tree catalogue : on this wider narrative level, Orpheus’ grove further symbolically functions as a poetic funeral pyre. The tree catalogue therefore bears internal and external resonance for its conceptual recollection of death and the underworld, implicating both Orpheus and Ovid in a joint enterprise to shape the identity of this poetic landscape as not a simple locus amoenus, but a space of fundamental ambiguity and liminality.

Singing to the Shade : Orpheus’ Grove and the Underworld

2 After Orpheus’ journey to the Underworld, he returns unwillingly to his Thracian homeland, thwarted of his heart’s desire (despite a successful song). The level, verdant plain where he resumes his defining activity as a bard and prepares to sing anew lacks a cover of shade, and so he strums his lyre and charms the landscape into providing this cover. Not just any shade arrives at his musical behest, but a grove of twenty-seven trees. His need may appear purely pastoral, but the shade that arrives is anything but : Collis erat collemque super planissima campi area, quam uiridem faciebant graminis herbae. umbra loco deerat ; qua postquam parte resedit dis genitus uates et fila sonantia mouit, umbra loco uenit. (Met. 10. 86-90)

There was a hill, and on the hill the levellest of plains, which grass was making green. There was no shade in the place. After he settled himself within that space, the god-born singer, and strummed the sounding strings, shade came there, to that place.

3 The catalogue that follows is populated by impressive detail—twenty-seven trees in total, twenty-six within the space proper of the catalogue, whilst the cypress stands as the twenty-seventh, included in the extended aetiological tale of Cyparissus. Despite the remarkability of the grove’s arboreal cover—a surfeit, really, of pastoral shade—the catalogue has largely escaped the detailed attention of Ovid’s readers and commentators.2 The shade that Orpheus summons in which to stage his return to song is twice denoted by umbra ( Met. 10. 88, 90) ; the trees not only form the desired environment for the production of song, but also comprise the immediate audience of Orpheus’ song, a song of love and loss through which his own experience is filtered. While the lack of shade is one thing Orpheus can redress with his enchanting powers of song, the loss of his wife is not so easily remedied. The well-recognised dual meaning of umbra circumstantially links this new song of Orpheus with the song he performs in the Underworld in his attempt to regain Eurydice, a song which also had an audience of shades (10. 17-39).3 The relationship between the two meanings of the word and their appearances at these critical junctures in the book has either been disavowed4 or restricted to the act of alluding specifically to the umbra of Eurydice.5 Eurydice, in remaining an umbra despite the efforts of Orpheus, certainly facilitates an evocation of

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this semantic overlap, but her existence as a shade is not the only component that allows for this duality of meaning to be activated. Instead, the dual meaning of umbra should be allowed to rest on the level of generality. This allowance creates an atmospheric equivocation between these two arenas of Orphic song, the grove and the Underworld. The power Orpheus displays over the trees in arranging them about himself has already been seen at work over the shades in Tartarus : the shades themselves weep, while Tantalus ignores the fleeing water, the wheel of Ixion halts, the eagles no longer pluck at the liver of Tityus, the urns of the Danaids lie vacant, and Sisyphus perches on his rock ; even the Furies weep for the first time (10. 40-46). These various personages are signalling features of the Stygian landscape, as much as its own ‘natural’ features of marshes and swamps, patches of misty darkness, rivers coiling through dark valleys. The terrain of the Underworld is known by these characters and demarcated by the environments that comprise their personal vignettes of punishment : Virgil, Propertius, and Tibullus all integrate such characters in giving shape to their poetic Underworlds.6 Orpheus’ control over the shades of the Underworld may be regarded as a type of control over the Stygian landscape itself, which is subsequently transmuted into his power over the Thracian landscape and the gathering of the appropriate conditions for song. An atmospheric connection is forged through the similar ‘shady’ audiences of his songs, which fashions the grove as a new Underworld.

4 The phrases communicating the initial lack of shade and its Orphic remedy are echoing and responsive : umbra loco deerat (‘shade was lacking in the space’, 10. 88) is answered by umbra loco uenit (‘shade came to the space’, 10. 90), as Orpheus strums his lyre. The introductory structure of the catalogue reinforces this play between presence and absence : the presence of the trees that heed Orpheus’ musical call is initially communicated by double negatives, non Chaonis abfuit arbor (‘nor was the Chaonian tree absent’, 10. 90). This construction prioritises absence over presence, as the lack of shade is remedied by a list of trees that are, to paraphrase loosely, not not there.7 Awareness of such a line between absence and presence is also immanent in the idea of an umbra ; the shade of the departed is simultaneously there and not there, something seen but ungraspable.8 Lending the catalogue this shape makes the shade of the trees thematically contiguous with the shades of the Underworld, promoting a greater sense of environmental continuity between the locales of Orpheus’ two songs.

5 Ovid also communicates a sense of world-building within the formation of the grove by a subtle feint towards the realm of cosmogony with the opening tree, the Chaonis arbor (10. 90). Ostensibly, the Chaonis arbor opens the catalogue because of its connection to Jupiter, for it neatly mirrors the opening of Orpheus’ song (‘ab Ioue, Musa parens, (cedunt Iouis omnia regno),/carmina nostra moue’, ‘ from Jove, mother Muse, for all things yield to the power of Jove, stir my song’, 10.148-149), and initiates the many parallels between the creation of the grove and the creation of the song it becomes home to. However, the embedded chaos found in Chaonis also hints at the act of cosmogony, gesturing towards the space of world-beginnings.9 During his descent, Orpheus begs in the name of three places for Eurydice’s release, including per Chaos hoc ingens (10.30) ; appearing a mere sixty lines before the appearance of the Chaonis arbor, this makes an activation of the verbal play both more deliberate and suggestive. In this usage, Chaos is employed as a designation for the void of the Underworld, which likewise lends another valence to

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discovering chaos in Chaonis.10 This first tree therefore delineates the space of the grove as distinct and other, and one with a link to the Underworld.

Otherworldly Precedents : Ovidian Landscapes of Liminality

6 The grove of Orpheus is not the only landscape within the Metamorphoses to carry such imbuements of otherworldly places. Two of these landscapes merit recognition here, along with the attendant experiences of their environments : Narcissus’ pool and the wood surrounding Pergus, the site of Proserpina’s abduction. As stated, on a practical level, one hardly imagines twenty-seven trees necessary for the provision of the type of protective cover a singing performance generally demands. The grove represents much more than cursory shelter from the sun. Blocking the rays of the sun is a specifically detailed descriptive characteristic of the forest surrounding Narcissus’ pool : fons erat inlimis, nitidis argenteus undis, quem neque pastores neque pastae monte capellae contigerant aliudue pecus, quem nulla uolucris nec fera turbarat nec lapsus ab arbore ramus ; gramen erat circa quod proximus umor alebat, siluaque sole locum passura tepescere nullo. (Met. 3. 407-412)

There was a clear pool, silvered by its shining ripples which neither shepherds nor mountain-grazed she-goats nor any other flock chanced upon, which no bird nor beast disturbed, nor branch falling from a tree ; Grass encircled it, fed by the nearby moisture, and the forest stood guard, allowing the pool no warmth from the sun’s rays.

7 The chilly perfection of Narcissus’ pool, where no sun allowed to penetrate and warm its waters, lends a distinct air of the Underworld’s stasis. Its stillness is otherworldly, disturbed by neither man, beast, nor even nature itself. The lack of birds (nulla uolucris… turbarat), given that bird-song is a stereotypical feature of the locus amoenus, could also indicate awareness of the Greek derivation of Avernus from ἄορνις.11 Beside and within this otherworldly pool, Narcissus’ continual, frustrated attempts to embrace his reflection also echo the efforts made to try and embrace the shades of loved ones.12 His reflection is itself, tellingly, called an imaginis umbra (‘shadow of a likeness’, 3. 434).13 Although Tarrant treats line 3. 417 as an interpolation in his edition of the Metamorphoses, Hardie not only preserves the line, but reads the alternate manuscript tradition of umbra in place of unda (spem sine corpore amat, corpus putat esse quod umbra est, ‘he loves a disembodied hope, giving a form to what is only shadow’), as he traces the Lucretian influence and inspiration within Ovid’s tale of Narcissus. He identifies Narcissus’ behavioural interactions with his ‘beloved’ as rooted within Lucretius’ description of the imagistic experience of seeing into a sort of Underworld when gazing into a puddle of water (Lucr. DRN 4. 416-419).14 Narcissus and Orpheus are figures further united by experiencing versions of paraclausithyra staged by the natural world,15 as water acts as the dividing force for Narcissus and his beloved reflection, whilst Orpheus is barred from re-entry into the Underworld (and therefore, from access to Eurydice) by the Styx (10. 72-75). Each lover is so preoccupied as to neglect basic human need for food and drink (3. 437-438 ; 10. 73-75), and their loves yet endure in the dark

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wastes of the Underworld : Narcissus, as a shade, still gazes at his reflection in the Styx (tum quoque se, postquam est inferna sede receptus,/in Stygia spectabat aqua, ‘even then, after he was welcomed to the infernal realm, he yet gazed at himself in a Stygian mirror’, 3. 504-505), whilst Orpheus professes that he shall stay there if his request is denied (‘quod si fata negant ueniam pro coniuge, certum est/ nolle redire mihi ; leto gaudete duorum,’ ‘but if the fates deny me mercy on my wife’s behalf, there is one certainty : I do not wish to make my own return. Rejoice in a twinned death’, 10.38-39). Although Orpheus is rebuffed in his attempts to cross the river again in the wake of Eurydice’s second loss, he nevertheless symbolically returns to the Underworld through his creation of the dark grove, and sings again, as he once did in order to regain her.16 Narcissus, too, shares in the experience of acknowledging and manipulating trees as an audience for poetic expressions of loss, desire and longing. In an isolated moment, tearing his gaze from his reflection, Narcissus calls upon the surrounding trees as witnesses : paulumque leuatus, ad circumstantes tendens sua bracchia siluas ‘ecquis, io siluae, crudelius’ inquit ‘amauit ? scitis enim et multis latebra opportuna fuistis.’ (Met. 3. 440-443)

Barely tearing himself away, stretching out his arms to the witnessing wood he cries, ‘is there anyone who has loved more cruelly, trees ? You should know ; you have lent yourself as secret lairs to many a lover.’

8 Narcissus’ supplicating gesture as he bewails the cruelty of his love (tendens sua bracchia) is gesturally echoed by Orpheus’ attempt to embrace the shade of Eurydice (bracchiaque intendens, 10. 58),17 but the idea of trees as witnesses consciously attuned to love takes root more concretely in Orpheus’ grove, where many of the trees present are in fact subjects of the Metamorphoses now veiled by their transformations : Daphne is present as the innuba laurus (10. 92) the first addition to the natural world in Book 1 ; the sisters of Phaethon from Book 2 form the nemus Heliadum (10. 91) ; Baucis, whose story is narrated in Book 8, is in attendance as the tilia (10. 91), while Dryope and Lotos are represented by the lotus (10. 96), a transformation told in Book 9. They are physical witnesses to Orpheus’ song as its own part of the Metamorphoses, but also literary witnesses, which further transforms Orpheus’ grove into not just a literal grove, but symbolically rendered as a textual grove.18 The grove of Orpheus sequesters narratives from the wider narrative frame of the Metamorphoses, culling an audience from its volumes in a fashion mimetic of his own narrative role within its pages ; this is repeated within his song in the inset narration of Venus to Adonis of Atalanta and Hippomenes (10. 560-707), thereby creating an instance of narrative ring composition that mimics the circular arrangement of the grove around the singer. Ovid does not let his readers forget that although Orpheus is the internal manipulator of the landscape, it is nevertheless Ovid’s own construct of literary shade that Orpheus shrouds himself with.

9 Narcissus and his mode of interaction with his physical surroundings therefore find a number of resonances within Orpheus’ tale, not least in the ways in which their respective landscapes are marked by atmospheric connectivity to a different realm. The woods surrounding Pergus also deserve mention (albeit more briefly) for the way they likewise imaginatively conjure the presence of the Underworld. In a familiar visual

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dynamic, the fringe of trees surrounding the lake similarly forbids the passage of sunlight : silua coronat aquas cingens latus omne suisque/ frondibus ut uelo Phoebeos summouet ictus (‘A wood crowns the waters, encircling it from all sides with bowing branches, so keeping out the rays of the sun with its leafy veil’, 5. 388-389). This landscape configuration neatly anticipates Proserpina’s abduction to the Underworld, a place sunlight cannot penetrate.19 The shady darkness that characterizes this natural environment of her ensconcing, like the dead calm of Narcissus’ reflecting pool, symbolically prefigures her displacement to the Underworld, and also visually projects in compressed, naturalistic iconography, her new role : the darkness of the foliage takes the form of a crown (coronat) and veil (uelo), painting her as the royal matrona of Pluto (cf. 5. 506-508, where Arethusa identifies her as a new regina and matrona).20 The fates of Narcissus and Proserpina are written into and projected by the landscape, and, as such, they provide apt imaginative frameworks with which to consider Orpheus’ grove. However, the grove of Orpheus reverses these acts of symbolic foreshadowing enacted by the physical landscape ; instead, he is the active agent in creating an atmosphere designed to return him to a previous time and place. The grove is an environment masquerading as an emotional time-capsule : the very creation of the grove is an act of looking back, an attempt to return to the environs of the Underworld where his song was successful, but he himself was not.

Casting Shadows : the Legacy of Virgilian Umbrae

10 Now that the overall descriptive context has been established for Ovid consciously trading upon the range of meaning of umbra, and two contextually evocative Ovidian landscapes discussed as precedents for the generative dynamic behind Orpheus’ grove, the subtleties of this interplay with umbra warrant more detailed attention. The grove as a purposefully constructed atmospheric doublet of the Underworld inherently makes it a space of complicated liminality, and ambiguous in a way that the stereotypical epic grove or locus amoenus is emphatically not. The ambiguity of this grove is also determined by and reliant upon the ambiguity in umbra’s meaning ; it is the literary consciousness of this semantic overlap and its potential for exploitation that can now be addressed. Primarily, we shall see how the Ovidian manipulation of umbra and this awakening of ambiguity traffics in the legacy of the progressive exploration of umbra Virgil makes across his poetic oeuvre.

11 Shade is, of course, a defining symbol of the Eclogues. The image of shade provides a crystallising instance of ring composition both within the first Eclogue and the collection as a whole : the repose of Tityrus, lentus in umbra, is recalled in his offer of hospitality to Meliboeus, against the backdrop of evening’s spreading shadows (et iam summa procul uillarum culmina fumant/ maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae, ‘and already the tallest rooftops of the faraway villas are smoking, and growing shadows fall from the mountain heights’, Ecl. 1. 82-83). These evening shadows, neither explicitly ominous, nor the pastoral protective cover from the midday sun, are transformed into the final image of shade that closes the Eclogues, where the bucolic world draws homewards in response to this dangerous, closural shade : surgamus : solet esse grauis cantantibus umbra, iuniperi grauis umbra ; nocent et frugibus umbrae. ite domum saturae, uenit Hesperus, ite capellae. (Ecl. 10.75-77)

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Let us arise : shade can be harmful to those singing, the oppressive shade of the juniper ; the shadows impede growth. Go home, goats, grazed to satisfaction ; the evening star arrives.

12 Shade gives a coherent shape to the collection, and, at its close, gives an image of finality that begins to hint at umbra’s multiplicity of meanings—to resemble shade as a monument to the finality of death. Gallus, the subject of lament throughout the final Eclogue, is perishing from love (indigno...amore peribat, ‘perishing from an unworthy love’, Ecl. 10.10), loosely assuming the role of the dying Daphnis from Theocritus’ first Idyll. Even though the figure of the dying Gallus in Eclogue 10 is a poetic construction, a combination of literary borrowing and historical reality that describes a metaphorical, rather than real, death, there is yet a way that umbra can be interpreted within the framework of death as the poem presents it. This use of umbra within the framework of metaphorical death also confines its duality of meaning to a significance of greater subtlety. In the embedded lament of Gallus, he associates himself, his poetry, and love with trees, as they become the communicative medium for his love : he shall carve his love (amores) or love poetry (Amores) on trees, consigning his love and poetry to the hopes of memorialising, arboreal growth (Ecl. 10. 52-54).21 Gallus’ love, finding imagistic expression on trees, is transformed into the image of Virgil’s own love for Gallus, a love that likewise grows as trees (Gallo, cuius amor tantum crescit in horas/ quantum uere nouo uiridis se subicit alnus, ‘for Gallus, love of whom grows as much by the hour as the alder in early spring submits itself to its own greening’, Ecl. 10. 73-74).22 The trees bearing Gallus’ poetry (and prefiguring himself eventually becoming an umbra, perishing from love in the sustained imagining of this poetic scenario) are the trees whose influential shade Virgil needs to escape,23 a process he begins with supplanting the Gallan trees with his own image of the alder, which then cedes to the final darkness of shade that must be avoided. Gallus’ metaphorical ‘death’ yet speaks to a moment where Gallus will become a shade, as he leaves behind a poetic monument in the form of shade, in his inscribed trees. The undertones of death are here delicately veiled, as befits the ultimately figurative notion of Gallus’ fatal lovesickness, infiltrating the scene contextually in the nexus of arboreal imagery that visualises love and elegy, the genre of both love and loss. A direct allusion to the alternate meaning of umbra as a ghost would here irrevocably and irreparably overpower the positive associations for pastoral, tainting the host of symbolic meanings accrued within the meticulously curated space of the Eclogues ; the associations are too dangerous for explicit evocation, but not for subtle implication, opportunely evoked by the ‘dying’ Gallus and his elegiac arboreal monument.

13 Gallus and the closing image of the tenth Eclogue begin to hint at the range of significance umbra holds, but there is no explicit exploitation of the full effect the overlap in meaning can furnish. The faint trace of this potential borne at the end of the Eclogues, however, accumulates associative meaning in the final book of the Georgics, in the Orpheus-Eurydice epyllion, which gives Ovid a restrained model for his own treatment of the myth in the Metamorphoses, where he does make a direct link between the shades of the Underworld and the shade(s) of the grove. Virgil embeds fragments and images of atmospheric continuity between Orpheus’ experience in the Underworld and his return to Thrace that gain more suggestive depth when the filter of umbra’s dual meaning is imposed. Virgil first introduces the shades of the Underworld in a reworked Homeric simile. They flock, birdlike, to the sounds of Orpheus’ song :

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at cantu commotae Erebi de sedibus imis umbrae ibant tenues simulacraque luce carentum, quam multa in foliis auium se milia condunt, Vesper ubi aut hibernus agit de montibus imber. (Georg. 4.471-474)

And conjured by song, from the deepest roots of Erebus the shades gather, wisps, and the forms of those deprived of life’s light as many as the thousands of birds that hide away in the shelter of foliage when the evening star comes, or a winter rain descends from the mountains.

14 The shades gather in the manner of birds that themselves hide away amidst the shade. Another way to translate condunt could be to ‘bury’, effectively seeing the birds metaphorically inter or entomb themselves amidst the shade, lending a further layer of the implication of death through the verb’s multivalence.24 The wintriness of the simile (hibernus) anticipates the strong sense of gelid sterility expressed in the Thracian landscape Orpheus returns to, scorning love (solus Hyperboreas glacies Tanaimque niualem/ aruaque Riphaeis numquam uiduata pruinis/ lustrabat…, ‘alone he wanders the icy Hyperborean northlands and the snowy Don and the fields along the Riphaean ridge, never without the sheen of frost’, Georg. 4. 517-519), but it is the comparison of shades to birds that is contextually reactivated in the simile comparing the lovelorn Orpheus to a mourning nightingale : qualis populea maerens philomela sub umbra amissos queritur fetus, quos durus arator obseruans nido implumis detraxit ; at illa flet noctem, ramoque sedens miserabile carmen integrat, et maestis late loca questibus implet. (Georg. 4.511-515)

Just as the nightingale mourning under the poplar shade laments her missing nestlings, which the pitiless farmer watchful, dragged from the nest, without the down of feathers ; and so she grieves by night, sitting on the branch, making her mournful song anew, and she fills the spaces far and wide with her sad cries.

15 The nightingale, grieving under the shade (sub umbra) and at night (flet noctem), functions as a textual hinge, looking back to the simile of shades as birds within the darkness of the Underworld, as she occupies an environment that is also determined by the presence of umbra.25 With these sets of similes, Virgil builds a notion of a collective shared environment within this simile-space, one that is strengthened in tonal evocations of darkness and mourning by awareness of the double meaning of umbra. The lines in meaning are blurred within this shared conceptual space of shades as birds, and Orpheus as a bird, mourning under the poplar.

16 The Orpheus-Eurydice epyllion itself casts a long shadow of influence, first of all upon Virgil himself. In refashioning his own mythical treatment to fit the contours of the encounter between Creusa and Aeneas in Aeneid 2, Virgil loosens such measures of restraint in capitalising upon this overlap in meaning :26 ausus quin etiam uoces iactare per umbram impleui clamore uias, maestusque Creusam nequiquam ingeminans iterumque iterumque uocaui. quaerenti et tectis urbis sine fine ruenti infelix simulacrum atque ipsius umbra Creusae uisa mihi ante oculos et nota maior imago. (Aen. 2.768-773)

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Even yet, venturing to cast my voice through the shadow I filled the streets with my cry, and sadly, I called ‘Creusa’ again and again, redoubling my efforts in vain. And the unlucky image, the very ghost, of Creusa herself appeared before my eyes, that had been seeking her in the ceaseless ruin of the city ; this vision of her was larger than life.

17 Virgil uses umbra twice within the space of five lines, first to describe the darkness of the Hell of falling Troy, and secondly, to describe the spirit of the vanished Creusa. The closeness of the repetition forcibly associates the two meanings, encouraged by the vertical juxtaposition of the line endings umbram and Creusam (2.768-769). Aeneas is recast as the nightingale-Orpheus from Georgics 4, echoing her song of mourning (et maestis late loca questibus implet, ‘she fills the spaces far and wide with sad cries’, Georg. 4. 515) with his ‘song’ of searching.27 The night-time shadows, an Underworld redux, anticipate the shade of Creusa, materialising from their midst, overtly signalling awareness of a blend of significance.

18 Before moving on to the further literary legacy of Virgil’s Orpheus and related manipulated usages of umbra, it is worth recalling Gowers’ summarising words on Virgilian shade, which reinforces just how critical the idea of shade is to the poet, and the cumulative momentousness of its significance to his works, both structurally and symbolically. In discussing the Corycian senex from Georgics 4, she takes as her point of departure the poet’s ending of this enclosed narrative with shade, coming on the heels of his description of the landscape’s seasonal acceleration : “as for the very last word of the description, umbras (‘shade’, 146), this corresponds to the last word of the first Eclogue (umbrae, 1.83), the last word of the penultimate line of the last Eclogue (umbrae, 10.76), and the last word of the Aeneid (umbras, 12.952), which links this miniature progress through the seasons to Virgil’s other sombre poetic endings, past and future, and the patterned end of a poetic career : death, or basking in the shadow of a tree.”28 It is a consciousness of these endings, and how their different meanings yet imbue each other with a referential awareness and significance, that further contribute to a sense of powerful ambiguity able to be harnessed in developing further the poetic capabilities of umbra in post-Virgilian verse.

Lighter Shades : Orpheus and the Inherited Poetics of Umbra

19 The Virgilian Orpheus also provides the initial thread in an intricate latticework of intertextuality that further informs how Ovid characterises his Orpheus, as regards both song and landscape. One of the receptive strands of Virgilian influence is found in Horatian lyric, most powerfully in a circumstance that also brings together the ideas of death and trees : the curse-ode Horace directs at the tree that nearly kills him, which ends in a series of images as imaginatively experienced in the poet’s ‘catabasis.’ The fanciful vignette of the enchanting powers of song displayed by Alcaeus (contrasted with the powers of Sappho) is patterned after Orpheus.29 The audience for these song offerings are the shades (umbrae) : quam paene furvae regna Proserpinae et iudicantem vidimus Aeacum sedesque discretas piorum et Aeoliis fidibus querentem

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Sappho puellis de popularibus, et te sonantem plenius aureo, Alcaee, plectro dura navis, dura fugae mala, dura belli. utrumque sacro digna silentio mirantur umbrae dicere, sed magis pugnas et exactos tyrannos densum umeris bibit aure volgus. (Hor. Carm. 2.13.21-32)

Just barely did I escape seeing the dusky kingdom of Proserpina and the adjudications of Aeacus, and the seats sequestered for the loyal and Sappho, lamenting in Aeolian strains girls of her native lands and you, Alcaeus, sounding off in fuller fashion with your golden plectrum, about the hardships of life at sea, the harsh realities of exile, the weights of war. The shades marvel at each proclaiming things worthy of silence’s sacrament, but the throng, jostling shoulder to shoulder, drinks in with more eager ear battlesongs and of tyrants run out.

20 Alcaeus wins the popular vote : his songs, thrice characterised as dura, capture the attention of the shades more successfully than the elegiac lamenting of Sappho (Aeoliis fidibus querentem/ Sappho puellis de popularibus). Alcaeus as the Orpheus-figure is noteworthy here, for other textual resonances otherwise align Orpheus more closely with Sappho. In the case of Ovid (or his imitators), this is especially notable in Heroides 15,30 which details Sappho relinquishing lyric for elegy out of love for Phaon ; she characterises her new genre as ‘tearful’, elegia flebile carmen ( ES 7). This pointed designation for elegy powerfully links Sappho to the Orpheus of Metamorphoses 10/11 : caput, Hebre, lyramque excipis, et (mirum !) medio dum labitur amne, flebile nescioquid queritur lyra, flebile lingua murmurat exanimis, respondent flebile ripae. (Met. 11.50-53)

You welcomed his head and lyre, Hebrus, and while it streamed down the middle of the eddies (the marvel !) the lyre lamented something tearful, the lifeless tongue murmured tearfully, and the banks echoed, tearful in turn.

21 Sappho and Orpheus are also biographically linked through the circumstances of their love : Sappho, famed for her poems addressed to female loves, now writes in a new genre expressing her passion for a male lover, while Orpheus too has had the objects of his desire transferred from female to male, and must find measures to suit. Sappho furthermore compares herself to a nightingale, which intertextually binds her experience of love to the Orpheus of Georgics 4 : quin etiam rami positis lugere uidentur frondibus, et nullae dulce queruntur aues. sola uirum non ulta pie maestissima mater concinit Ismarium Daulias ales Ityn. ales Ityn, Sappho desertos cantant amores. hactenus ; ut media cetera nocte silent. (ES 151-156)

And even the branches appear to grieve with falling leaves, and no birds sing their sweet complaints. Only the most mournful mother, unlawful avenger of her husband, sings, the Daulian bird, of Thracian Itys.

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22 Sappho may mourn like the nightingale—that is to say, like the Virgilian Orpheus—but the specification of Daulias also implicates Catullus within this illustration of querulous lament.31 Catullus mourns his lost brother as the nightingale sings under the cover of shade in very much an instance of self-conscious trading upon umbra’s dual meaning : at certe semper amabo, semper maesta tua carmina morte canam, qualia sub densis ramorum concinit umbris Daulias, absumpti fata gemens Ityli.– (Catull. 65.11-14)

But of course I will always love you always I will sing songs saddened by your death just as the Daulian bird sings under the close shade of branches bewailing the fate of Itys, stolen away.

23 Catullus’ use of umbra is especially marked by virtue of its position as a departure from his poetic model, a passage in the Odyssey where the myth is briefly presented in a portrait of Penelope mourning as the nightingale, ‘sitting amongst the thick leaves of the trees’, (δενδρέων ἐν πετάλοισι καθεζομένη πυκινοῖσιν, Hom. Od. 19.520). 32 Catullus’ densis ramorum…umbris hearkens back to this Homeric description, but substitutes umbris for πετάλοισι. 33 This poem also marks the juncture at which the Catullan collection shifts towards elegy, which, along with the presence of the Muses and vocabulary of clear generic reference, has led to speculation about its positioning as being programmatic for an elegiac volume.34 Sappho, in penning her letter to Phaon in this newly assumed elegiac form, therefore also seems inspired not only by Catullan imagery, but by this structural relevance of this Catullan poem within the collection ; she also draws upon an image of the ‘Daulian’ bird to effect awareness of a generic shift.35 Sappho, having taken up the mantle of the elegiac Catullus in writing to Phaon, abandoning lyric, also seems to acknowledge this same ode of Horace (2.13) and the privileging of Alcaeus’ poetic themes over her own, inasmuch as the shades judge : nec plus Alcaeus, consors patriaque lyraeque/ laudis habet, quamuis grandius ille sonet (‘Nor is Alcaeus more praised, sharer of land and lyre, although he sounds off more grandly’, ES 29-30) exhibits awareness of the themes of dura nauis/ dura fugae mala, dura belli (Hor. Carm. 2. 13. 27-28), neatly encapsulated in the assessment of grandius.36 If Sappho is acknowledging this moment of literary praise found in Horace, and differentiating herself from Alcaeus in this same way, she can presumably further identify the audience who, according to Horace, appreciates Alcaeus more because of his grander material : the shades. This internal literary awareness of audience preferences can therefore be manipulated to intertextual advantage, when it comes to a figure she is textually related to : it seems that the Ovidian Orpheus is determined not to be an elegiac Sappho to the shades, but a crowd-pleasing lyricist. Orpheus’ song to the shades operates under the auspices of nothing so much as a Horatian lyric logic : omnia debemur uobis, paulumque morati/ serius aut citius sedem properamus ad unam (‘we owe everything to you, and despite small delays, sooner or later we shall all arrive in this self-same seat, together’, Met. 10. 32-33) is a sentiment directly inspired by Horatian expression : omnes eodem cogimur, omnium uersatur urna serius ocius sors exitura et nos in aeternum exsilium impositura cumbae. (Carm. 2.3.25-28)

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We are all compelled to the same place, the urn turns for each of us sooner or later the lot of coming abandon, and we shall all weigh down the skiff of forever exile.

24 Given Horace’s poetic self-styling as a Roman Alcaeus, Ovid’s use of Horace’s words to illustrate the message of Orpheus’ song to the shades in order to regain his wife can be construed as part of a complex self-conscious cycle of allusions : the shades prefer Alcaeus to Sappho, as demonstrated in Horace’s poetic catabasis, and so Ovid’s Orpheus paraphrases the ‘Roman Alcaeus’ in his persuasive efforts in the Underworld. However, the situational basis of knowledge that underpins this sly paraphrasing comes from a Horatian ode that relies heavily upon the textual scenery of Georgics 4,37 so linking the two Orpheuses : Ovid’s Orpheus, through a receptive Horatian filter, is made to functionally reprise the figure of the Virgilian Orpheus, in an act that represents a poetic strategy subtly advised by the Ovidian Sappho (who also textually relies upon the Virgilian Orpheus) through her acknowledgment of Alcaeus and his material. Virgil does not report Orpheus’ song to the shades in the fourth Georgic, so the lyric momentum of the Ovidian Orpheus’ song are part of a poetic design that purposefully differentiates the Ovidian presentation of the mythical bard, but yet makes him dependent upon his Virgilian construction. The grove of literary allusions that grow around the figure of Ovid’s Orpheus begins and ends with Virgil, and throughout are predicated upon this associative poetics of umbra to create the intentional atmospheric ambiguity of what it means to sing to an audience of shades, and how to do it.

Tree Catalogues and Funeral Pyres : Problematising the Orphic Locus Amoenus

25 If Orpheus is reprising the environment of the Underworld in the creation of his grove, and reprising his original audience through the manipulation of umbra’s double meaning, this makes any assessment of the space as a locus amoenus ultimately untenable. This argument has been extended for Orpheus’ grove, in a discussion Hinds makes of the ecphrastic est locus formula. It is worth quoting in full here :

26 Ovid applies the same kind of interest in formular play to the particular distillation of local description which is (or, if you will, which becomes) the locus amoenus. Since Curtius a passage from Met. 10 has been a byword here. An est locus-type opening describes the landscape in which the Ur-poet Orpheus sits down, like a pastoral shepherd, to sing the songs of love and loss which will occupy the rest of Ovid’s book. However, a crucial element is lacking to the standard setting : shade (88 umbra loco deerat). Orpheus’ famous telekinetic powers put him in a unique position to address this problem. Using his lyre to summon to the spot a forest of twenty-seven species, meticulously catalogued by Ovid (Met. 10.90-106), he supplies the missing element, in effect adjusting the real world to fit the proprieties of the rhetorical one : 90 umbra loco uenit. The very amplitude of the grove thus summoned is itself part of the passage’s rhetorical self-consciousness…Orpheus’ fictive status as humankind’s originary bard opens up a novel way of reading his virtuoso creation of shade at Met. 10.86-90 : not as a belated play upon a well-established poetic topos or commonplace, but as an account of the first invention of the ideal landscape.38

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27 Hinds’ view is attractively phrased, but to extend the view of Orpheus’ grove (despite a lack of running water and light, refreshing breezes) to the original locus amoenus detracts from a different consideration of what the primary design of such a catalogue of trees is intended for : a new Underworld for Orpheus, and a transformation of an epic topos, for Ovid. The grove, as a doublet of the Underworld, is intrinsically inamoenus, in line with the kingdom of Hades being designated inamoena regna (10.15).39 The role of the grove as a neo-Underworld for Orpheus plays part of a wider narrative purpose for Ovid : to present the grove of Orpheus as a poetic, symbolic funeral pyre.

28 The epic tradition for including a list of trees is historically associated with the need for a funeral pyre ; the list denotes those species felled for its creation.40 The appearance of the tree-felling topos can be traced back to the pyre made for Patroclus (Hom.Il. 23.117-20). Ennius ‘translates’ and modifies this passage to portray the preparations for burying the casualties of the battle of Heraclea in 280 B.C. (Ann. 6. fr. 175-179 Sk. = Macrob. Sat. 6. 2.27) : incedunt arbusta per alta, securibus caedunt, percellunt magnas quercus, exciditur ilex, fraxinus frangitur atque abies consternitur alta, pinus proceras peruortunt : omne sonabat arbustum fremitu siluai frondosai.

They proceeded through the deep thicket, and struck with axes, they downed great oaks, the holm is hewn down, the ash is crashed down and the high fir felled, the stately pines upturned : the entire thicket of forest sounds forth in a leafy roar.

29 Ennius’ version, as is clear, has expanded the type of trees from one to five (oak, holm oak, ash, fir, and pine), and rather than use compound adjectives as poetical adornment, he has personalised the felling of each tree with an individualised verb and a variety of sound effects created by alliteration and assonance. This act of personalising the experience creates a greater tone of emotional consequence, which invests the trees with an almost human presence and significance that is absent in their Homeric forebears, a conceit readily used by Ovid. Siluai here could also operate as a literary pun ; in Latin, silua comes to be used as a term signifying material for literary composition (OLD s.v. 5b), based on the double meaning of the Greek word ὕλη (‘forest’, or ‘raw material’, ‘matter’).41 If this conceit is already in place by Ennius’ time, the sense is that in this passage, the forest echoes with the sounds of Homer’s literary material.

30 The metapoetic valence of silua is certainly in poetic currency when Virgil adapts the topos for the beginning of Aeneid 6, where the preparations for the pyre of Misenus are illustrated : itur in antiquam siluam, stabula alta ferarum ; procumbunt piceae, sonat icta securibus ilex fraxineaeque trabes cuneis et fissile robur scinditur, aduoluunt ingentes montibus ornos. (Aen. 6.179-182)

An ancient wood is broached, the deep lair of beasts ; the pines pitch forward, the axe-struck holm-oak sounds, the beams of ash and splintery oak are cleaved with wedges the huge rowans are rolled down from the mountains.

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31 In a classic reading, Hinds identifies the pun in the opening itur in antiquam siluam ; the phrase indicates either the Trojans making their way into an ancient wood, or, the poet proceeding into Ennius’ older literary material.42 Once again, Virgil has varied the original oaks of Homer, leading the catalogue with spruce before moving on to holm- oak, ash, oak, and mountain ash (or rowan).43

32 In later epic, Silius Italicus’ Punica furnishes a tree catalogue ; the list of trees contains mountain ash (ornus), poplar (populus), holm-oak (ilex), oak (quercus), pine (pinus) and the cypress (cupressus, Pun. 10.527-535). The Thebaid provides another spectacular example at 6.90-107, in which Statius includes the beech (fagus), oaks (Chaoniumque nemus), cypress (cupressus), spruce (piceae), mountain ash (orni), holm-oak (iliceaeque trabes), the yew-tree (taxus), and more oak (robur), as well as fir (abies), pine (pinus), alder (alnus) and elm (ulmus). Statius’ version (likely written before Silius Italicus’) apart from his clear indebtedness to Virgil (procumbunt piceae, iliceaeque trabes, the use of scinditur with enjambment), also enjoys a small measure of engagement with the grove that Orpheus summons.44 And so, one might justifiably ask, given the traditional status of this poetic topos as an indelible part of the epic brand, why has the ever- competitive Ovid neglected this opportunity to insert his own version of the motif and sportingly vie with his poetic predecessors ?45 To just such a posed question, I would propose that the grove of Orpheus is intentionally designed to repurpose this customary use of tree catalogues. The felling is supplanted by the act of summoning, a different category of displacement via uprooting. Taken comprehensively, the creation of the grove functions on a symbolic level as the construction of a poetic funeral pyre, broadening the significance of the grove as a reconstructed Underworld. Ovid’s repurposing of this epic tradition allows the customary situational frame to be evoked, yet not replicated. The tree catalogue is itself the product of literary metamorphosis. Styling the grove as the material for a poetic funeral pyre is also logically coherent within the narrative progression of the tale : it is while Orpheus is singing to this specially formed audience of trees that he attracts the attention of the Bacchic zealots who proceed to dismember him. The grove and the poetics of exclusion it engenders, made specifically for Orpheus by Orpheus, directly relates to (if not fully catalyses) the death of the poet.

Conclusion

33 Orpheus’ grove represents a transformation across both levels of narrative, as Ovid transforms the topos of the epic tree catalogue and Orpheus transforms the Thracian landscape into his personal version of the Underworld. Orpheus creates this specialised atmosphere in which to sing his final song, a song that this very atmosphere is designed to assist, by looking back to his performance in the Underworld. Orpheus’ loss is drawn against this background and audience of trees ; he calls them together, in all their abundance, in an act of surrogacy for the shade that is lost to him while he yet lives—his wife Eurydice. Far from being the originary locus amoenus, the stand of trees summoned preserves Orpheus in a type of living death, while he relives his experiences of love and loss through the notes of his song. Understanding this landscape design, purposefully constructed to recreate the Underworld, rests fundamentally on the dual significance of umbra, a semantic overlap that carries with it the weight of inherited literary meaning and symbolism, yet here comes to a fruition that has wider,

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overarching interpretive ramifications for Metamorphoses 10 and Orpheus’ role within it. Ovid gathers the legacy of ambiguity resultant from Virgil’s collective, allusive engagement with umbra and its expressive potential, especially found in the myth of Orpheus from Georgics 4, to both characterise and situate his Orpheus, and encloses him within a landscape atmospherically delineated by this poetics of umbra. The grove of Orpheus is both formed from and casts the shade of literary influence, shadows Orpheus neither can nor wants to rise from, no matter how harmful.

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NOTES

1. The exchange between the two figures is based upon a Virgilian understanding of umbra as pioneered by the Eclogues; this understanding is formulated in the opening line of Smith’s (1965, 298) classic discussion of the bucolic topos, “The most prominent pattern of visual imagery in Vergil’s Eclogues is that associated with ideas of shade and repose—umbra and otium.” Cf. also how Venus settles herself and Adonis within a poplar shade to tell her own inset tale of Atalanta (Met. 10. 554-559). 2. A notable exception is Pöschl (1960=1986), who attempts to assign generic meaning to the company of trees in identifying what he considers a transitional progression from epic to elegy and back to epic again throughout the catalogue. See also Galand-Hallyn (1994) 230-233 and Romeo (2012) 45-49. For a symbolic analysis of shade within the Metamorphoses, see Jouteur (2001) 239-242, esp. 239. She does not discuss the grove of Orpheus within this context, but sees the concept of shade in its use across the Metamorphoses as a dangerous presence, a conceptualisation that suffers slightly from its reductionist view of the ways in which Ovid draws upon a host of meanings and associations. 3. Before its dual appearance at l.88 and 90, umbra is also found in the opening of Book 10 at l.12, 16, and 48; altogether, it is found ten times in Book 10, whilst any other single book can only boast up to a maximum of six instances (as noted by Stephens [1958] 180). For the literary history and significance of umbra as meaning ‘ghost,’ see the commentary of Reed on the umbras of l.48, p. 177. 4. See Bömer ad loc, who claims no connection exists. 5. Stephens (1958, 180) “Because Eurydice was not with Orpheus (umbra loco deerat), he was dispirited, but when he sings of love, her ghost appears (umbra loco uenit). We have a parallel to the visit to Hades; again Orpheus wins back his wife, although for a short time, by his art.” Reed’s note ad 90 is restricted to the following: “, metonimia per gli alberi stessi, denota che Orfeo ha controllo su almeno un tipo di umbra: Stephens 1957 pp.22-23 sottolinea il parallelo con l’umbra di Euridice,” citing the earlier dissertation that Stephens’ 1958 publication comes from, but not elaborating in any substantial way. 6. Virg. Georg. 4. 481-484; Aen. 6. 547-627; Tib. 1.3. 67-82 (with the reading of Houghton [2007]); Prop. 2.1.65-68; 2.17.5-10 7. In similar fashion, see also the commentary of Reed ad 10.11-12 for the complexities of the oppositional construction there between umbrae and aurae. 8. As is the famed experience of not only Aeneas (Aen. 2.792-794 = 6. 700-703) but also the Orpheus of the Georgics (Georg. 4. 497-502) and Metamorphoses (Ov. Met. 10.58-59). Cf. also the commentary of Reed ad 10.11-12 for further complexities of the parallel constructions between umbrae and aurae. 9. Ovid’s own cosmogony (both in the sense of the world and his epic) begins with Chaos, hearkening back to Hesiod (Theog. 116-117): ante mare et terras et quod tegit omnia caelum unus erat toto naturae uultus in orbe, quem dixere Chaos. (Met. 1.5-7) Before the sea and lands and everything the sky covered there was one face of nature to the entire world, which was known as Chaos.

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The heroic Orpheus was also known for singing a cosmogony (Ap. Rhod. Argon. 1.494-511). Maltby (1991) s.v. Chaonia only refers to the region’s name as a derivation from the eponymous hero Chaon, but this does not wholly detract from the possibility that the poet is making suggestive wordplay between Chaos and Chaonia. One might further note that a different region in Epirus, Thesprotia, was said to contain an entrance to the Underworld, largely through affiliations with the Acheron; cf. Paus. 1.17.5, 9.30.6; Tzetz. ad Lycoph. 704; Plin. HN 4.2; Strab. 6.1.5; Thuc. 1.46. 10. See the commentary of Reed ad loc. for similar usages of Chaos. 11. Regarding this passage, as noted by Hardie (2002) 157. Cf. also Leigh (1999) 187 n. 77 = (2010) 221 n. 77 for testimony. 12. See n. 7. 13. See the commentary of Barchiesi and Rosati ad loc. 14. Hardie (2002) 157. Hardie further notes Narcissus as akin to Tantalus in experiencing eternally deferred pleasure, never being able to attain the object of his desire; this makes his reading of umbra for unda interesting in light of the argument Lacki (2010) makes for the emendation of unda to umbra in the allusion to Tantalus at Heroides 16.211-212: nec proauo Stygia nostro captantur in umbra/ poma nec in mediis quaeritur umor aquis. Taken with the poma of the following line, Tantalus consequently in Lacki’s words (2010, 662) “snatches at fruits in ‘hellish darkness’, but more specifically, ‘in hellish shade’, -- the shade, that is of an understood tree.” Hardie’s discussion of Narcissus and Tantalus furnishes supporting evidence for this proposed emendation, which further supports my own line of thinking about Ovid’s self-conscious play with the dual meanings of umbra in the way his Orpheus recreates the atmosphere of the Underworld. 15. For Narcissus, cf. esp. Met. 3.448-450. 16. Orpheus’ eventual permanent reunion with Eurydice in the Underworld, without any behavioural restriction, also draws him closer to the experience of Narcissus’ love: both Orpheus and Narcissus, now shades, are still absorbed by love for a shade (Ov. Met. 11. 61-66). 17. The use of tendo and its compounds with bracchium is especially favoured by Ovid, who makes use of this phrasal combination more than any other author; cf. however the Virgilian instance of bracchia tendens to describe a tree whose crown extends to heavens, and its roots to Tartarus (Georg. 2.296). 18. This construction of a textual grove is extended further through the poetic debt of the Narcissus passage to Propertius 1.18, where the poet removes himself to a distant landscape that he uses as a reflective sounding board whilst he laments the circumstances of his love, on which see Pavlock (2009) 24-26. 19. Barring rare instances of natural disasters; cf. Met. 2.260-261 and Met. 5. 356-358; the latter is to a certain extent inspired by Hom. Il. 20.61-66. Cf. also the gloomy grove of Seneca’s Oedipus, which also lies in darkness (lucis et Phoebi inscius, 545). 20. Ovid’s grove also narratively blocks the Sun; Helios is replaced by Arethusa as the figure who tells Ceres of her daughter’s fate. 21. The most famous and final line of Gallus’ lament (omnia uincit Amor; et nos cedamus Amori, Ecl. 10. 69) also inspires Orpheus’ statement of uicit Amor (Met. 10. 26); see the commentary of Reed ad loc. 22. With the repeated use of cresco in both Gallus’ lament (10.54) and Virgil’s assessment of his own love there is perhaps an internal resonance with Ecl. 2.67 (et sol crescentis decedens duplicat umbras, ‘and the sun withdrawing doubles growing shadows’) and the shadows Corydon notes at the end of his declaration of love; another usage of shade to indicate the day drawing to a close, and not necessarily a positive image. 23. See the reading of Kennedy (1983) 124; for the concept of shade meaning influence, including that of a literary sort, see OLD s.v. umbra 3d and the examples cited therewith. 24. I owe this observation, with thanks, to one of the anonymous reviewers.

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25. The specification of the poplar tree (populea) as the site of her grief could also make further allusions to the two senses of shade, for Phaethon’s sisters were transformed into poplars out of grief; the small inset narration of this event in the Aeneid makes this connection more explicit with the formulation populeas inter frondes umbramque sororum (Virg. Aen. 10. 190). For the connection between the two passages, and the wider resonances between the Cycnus passage and the lament of Orpheus, see Fernandelli (2012) 128-129. In in the grove of Orpheus, the sisters of Phaethon are not specifically designated as poplars, but are simply designated by the phrase nemus Heliadum. Such a generalised designation is consistent with the picture of their metamorphosis in Book 2 (346-366), where the trees they become are not explicitly named. Elsewhere they become alders, as at Eclogue 6.62-63; cf. Clausen (1994) ad loc. Poplars are also associated with the Underworld through the figure of Hercules, who fashioned a wreath of white poplar to mark his ascent from the Underworld; For the associations between Hercules and the white poplar, see Paus. 5.14.2; Her. 9.64; Virg. Georg. 2.66 with Mynors (1990) ad loc., and Hor. Carm. 1.7.23, with Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) ad loc. Servius (ad Ecl. 7.61) also notes that the bicoloured leaves of the poplar symbolise the meeting of the upper and lower worlds, as the tree was created by Pluto to memorialise his love for Leuce. 26. This refashioning is well discussed by Putnam (1965) 41-47; cf. also Heurgon (1931). 27. Quaerenti (Aen. 2. 771) also in some ways textually echoes the queritur and questibus of the Georgics passage. 28. Gowers (2000) 132. Cf. also Theodorakopoulos (1997) 162-164. 29. Cf. Nisbet and Hubbard (1978) 201, 204-205 and esp. ad 2.13.33 and 36. For Horace’s interest in the Virgilian Orpheus’ descent to the Underworld as demonstrated in Odes 2, where recollections of this section of Georgics 4 appear in four different places, see Harrison (2013) 381-383. 30. The authenticity of the letter from Sappho to Phaon is heavily contested, but even if not by Ovid himself is composed in an indisputably Ovidian fashion. See Knox (1995) 12-14, who prints it under the heading of ‘Incerti Auctoris’, and the argument of Tarrant (1981), who reviews the scholarly argumentation around this question of authorship in outlining his own view of the letter as a non-Ovidian composition. 31. See Hallett (2005) for Catullus’ presence within the epistle; for the importance of the nightingale and its connection to Catullus see Rosati (1996) 213-215. Given the two occurrences in Catullus and an epistle written by “Sappho,” Woodman (2012) 142-143 postulates a Sapphic usage as the source for the derivations seen in Ovid and Catullus; the use of Daulias therefore allows Catullus to cast himself as both Sappho and Penelope, through the Homeric reminiscence of the myth; for a similar conclusion cf. Knox (1995) ad loc. For Catullus 65, elegy, and the Virgilian Orpheus see Barchiesi (1993) 363-365. 32. With attentiveness to names, it is also Catullus’ use of Ityli that further flags intentional adaptation of Homer (Ἴτυλον, Od. 19. 522); more commonly, the boy is Itys. 33. As observed by Woodman (2012) 141-142, who further notes the clever etymological gloss of Daulias provided by densis, given the meaning of the Greek adjective δαυλός as ‘thick.’ Orpheus’ lament in the Georgics also looks back upon this passage, but, as Fernandelli (2012, 126) notes, “in realtà, mentre la presenza di Od. XIX 518-523, nel testo di Virgilio, si risolve nel singolo, convenzionale dettaglio dell’usignolo che canta sotto le fronde, la similitudine di Od. XVI 216-219 offre al poeta romano spunti ben più significativi,” and identifies further important textual affiliations between this other Odyssean simile and the Virgilian text, a strategic decision of Virgil that lends further significance to Orpheus’ lament through a privileging of a passage that represents “la soluzione meno ovvia” (128). 34. Wiseman (1979) 176 = (2006) 67. 35. The nightingale and its lament also mark a difference between the accounts of Persephone’s rape in the Metamorphoses and the Fasti, as Ceres in the Fasti also mourns in the fashion of the Virgilian Orpheus: quacumque ingreditur, miseris loca cuncta querellis/ implet, ut amissum cum gemit

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ales Ityn (Fast. 4.481-482); cf. Hinds (1987) 104 and 160 n. 19 for its significance in signifying the Fasti’s elegiac nature. The nightingale often seems to perch on poetic boundaries of particular generic significance: of further consideration is Callimachus’ epigram in elegiac couplets for Heraclitus (Ep. 2 Pf. = 34 GP) which talks about his songs as nightingales; a persistent interpretive suggestion is that he was the composer of collection of elegiacs called ‘Nightingales.’ Again, in Callimachus’ fifth Hymn, the only hymn written in elegiacs, Chariclo mourns for Tiresias like the nightingale (Callim. Hymn 5.93-95). 36. Alcaeus’ work itself was also divided thematically by editors into political and non-political poems (στασιωτικά and non-στασιωτικά); see Pardini (1991), developed further by Porro (1994). Knox (1995) ad ES 30 also identifies a link between this passage and the Horatian text. 37. A passage itself identified as lyric; cf. the discussion of Fernandelli (2012) 124-132 for the lyricism of the Orpheus-epyllion. For Orpheus within the lyric tradition, see the sources collected in Reed (2013) 165. 38. Hinds (2002) 127. See also Schiesaro (2006, 436), who says “In Book 10 of the Metamorphoses Orpheus literally ‘invents’ the idyllic landscape of the locus amoenus,” as well as the description of Galand-Hallyn (1994, 230), “Le poète y décrit cette fois la création d’un locus amoenus par le plus prestigieux et le plus symbolique des poètes…” Bernstein (2011) 75-77 likewise describes it as a locus amoenus. Related to this idea of the locus amoenus, a few scholars have advanced the notion that the grove of Orpheus is connected to or reminiscent in some way of the Grynean Grove. Given the paucity of textual evidence available, it is difficult to assess how much merit this argument has, but it would seem to me to be a more secure connection to make only if Orpheus’ grove were existing as a more straightforward example of a locus amoenus, given Servius’ assessment of the grove as ubi est locus arboribus multis iucundus, gramine floribusque uariis omni tempore uestitus, abundans etiam fontibus (ad Ecl. 6.72). For these views, see Fabre-Serris (2005) 10-11 and Jouteur (2001) 70. For evidence of the Grynean Grove see van Groningen (1977) 169-170, ad Euphorion fr. 101. Of course, any possible evocation of the Grynean Grove does not necessarily diminish the ways in which Ovid is creating the space of Orpheus’ grove as one of profound ambiguity, but to use this connection as a way to further entrench understanding of the grove as a locus amoenus seems misguided, given the complexity of its construction. Determining a literary category other than locus amoenus or locus horridus that is accommodating of this type of studied ambiguity is an a topic for an independent piece; presently, I will restrict remarks on this issue to state that for other literary groves that seem to have inherited the textual spirit of the Ovidian grove (as being neither straightforwardly amoenus, nor horridus) one might look to the grove of the Culex (109-145) and (as an anonymous reader has suggested, to which I am indebted), the ‘shadie grove’ of Spenser’s Faerie Queen (I. i. 7ff.). Both groves are inclusive of an Ovidian-style tree catalogue, and incorporate notions of both sweetness and delight, and suggestive hints of the Underworld. 39. See the commentary of Reed ad loc. As Garrison (1992) 100 suggests, it is Ovid whose revision of the locus amoenus paves the way for the Silver Age commonality of the inamoenus; Ovid’s use of the adjective at Met. 10.15 is its first recorded appearance and is readily appropriated by Silver Age poets (cf. Garrison n. 7). The Ovidian inamoena seems to be in dialogue with the Virgilian inamabilis of both Georg. 4.479 and Aen. 6.438 (especially given the use of inamabile regnum at Met. 4.477 and 14.590, varying the inamoena regna of 10.15. with the Virgilian adjective). Because it is tied to unda in both places within the Virgilian corpus, it would seem inappropriate for the strength of inamabilis to further cast over the grove that Orpheus creates, given its lack of running water; for analysis of the Virgilian use of inamabilis, and its affiliation with water, see Pelliccia (1990); cf. however the Ovidan usage at Tr. 5.7.43. Ovid’s use of inamoena for the Underworld also sets it apart from Virgil’s, for Anchises describes the place he inhabits in the Underworld as amoena at Aen. 5.734. Anchises’ words are corroborated in Book 6 after Aeneas crosses into Elysium, deuenere locos laetos et amoena uirecta/ fortunatorum nemorum sedesque beatas

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(‘they came to the joyful places and greening pleasantries, and the blessed seats of blessed groves’, Aen. 6.638-639), where he sees none other than Orpheus (Threicius…sacerdos, 6.645). Ovid is careful to differentiate his account of the Underworld, a difference that is acknowledged when Orpheus is reunited with Eurydice: Orpheus sees the places he saw before (et quae loca uiderat ante, 11.61) but it is presumably in Elysium that he finds her (quaerensque per arua piorum/ inuenit Eurydicen, 11.62-63), a place reminiscent of Anchises’ amoena piorum. This textual connection adds further meaning to Orpheus’ suppression of any place of delight that he encounters on his tour of the Underworld in Book 10, which is further necessary if one consequently views the grove as a replication of the Underworld. Only when he regains Eurydice as a shade himself can places that are considered amoena exist for him. 40. Williams (1968) 263-267 uses this very phenomenon as an extended exemplum for his chapter on ‘The Blending of Greek and Roman’, tracing the poetic conceit from Homer to Statius, summarising grandly, “To some extent the history of Roman poetry is epitomized in the confrontation of these four passages from Ennius, Virgil, Silius, and Statius, if this is taken together with their relationship to the Greek of Homer.” (267). Introducing the tree catalogue in his commentary, Reed notes this topos together with citing other examples of loci amoeni (185); he too uses this designation unproblematically to describe Orpheus’ grove. 41. For this concept cf. Galand-Hallyn (1994) 120-121. 42. Hinds (1998) 11-14. 43. For a full analysis of the passage, see Williams (1968) 264 and Lamb (1950) 31. 44. Apart from the shared use of Chaonis to describe the oak, Statius’ grove seems to nod toward the completeness of Ovid’s with the descriptive phrase largae qua non opulentior umbrae/ Argolicos inter saltusque educta Lycaeos/ extulerat super astra caput (Stat. Theb. 6.91-93); the specific detail of extulerat super astra caput is perhaps a reference to the tree that ends the Ovidian catalogue, the cypress, illustrated by sidereum gracili spectare cacumine caelum (Met. 10.140). 45. The only act of tree-felling for a funeral pyre occurs in Book 9, when Hercules, in the throes of suffering, prepares his own pyre (Met. 9.229-232). On a related note, it is useful to consider the felling of Hercules’ funeral pyre as described in the Hercules Oetaeus, which provides another instance of the tree catalogue, albeit not in epic, but nevertheless in the ‘higher’ genre of tragedy. It begins with the felling of a beech and a pine that is reminiscent of the Homerically inspired formula for the felling topos, ending with the depiction of the sound, before breaking off and describing a huge oak, the felling of which comprises almost the rest of the passage: Chaonis quondam loquax /stat uasta late quercus et Phoebum uetat/ultraque totos porrigit ramos nemus ([Sen.] Herc. Oet. 1623-1625). Like the Ovidian groves we have seen, this oak is responsible for blocking out the sun. When the oak has finally been levelled, the sun’s rays are admitted and the hitherto unseen flock of birds is dislodged and made to seek their nests: protinus radios locus/admisit omnis: sedibus pulsae suis/uolucres pererrant nemore succiso diem/quaeruntque lassis garrulae pinnis domus. ([Sen.] Herc. Oet. 1630-1633). The destruction of this oak and its forest for the funeral pyre of Hercules (the only pyre whose felling Ovid illustrates in the Metamorphoses) therefore seems a deconstruction or a dismantling of the atmospheric Underworld created by Orpheus’ grove—the infernal elements are dispersed with the oak’s felling. In the obverse way that the grove indicates a sort of living death for Orpheus, the return of sun and birds with the felling of the oak for the pyre indicates the final realm of Hercules will not be the Underworld. The two passages therefore seem related in their functions; and consequently, through such an act of reception on Seneca’s behalf, lend credence to visualising the grove of Orpheus as a sort of poetic funeral pyre. Cf. Leigh (1999) 194-199 = (2010) 228- 232 for the challenges against the darkness of the grove in the Hercules Oetaeus.

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ABSTRACTS

This paper reexamines the grove of Orpheus in Ovid, Metamorphoses 10, arguing that it is a space of complex ambiguity as activated and determined by the dual meaning of umbra. It conceptualizes the space as an atmospheric doublet of the Underworld, designed to give Orpheus imaginative access to his lost wife Eurydice by providing a second set of shade(s) as an audience for his song. By calling attention to the ways in which Orpheus’ summoning of the grove casts it as a neo-Underworld, this paper seeks to unsettle the grove’s persistent designation as the originary locus amoenus. Altogether, across the levels of narrative, Orpheus and Ovid engage in a receptive repurposing and manipulation of both the idea of literary shade (as inherited and adapted from Virgil) and the trope of the tree catalogue (as familiarised in epic) to create a landscape of profound liminality.

INDEX

Keywords: Ovid, Metamorphoses, Orpheus, grove, umbra, shade, locus amoenus, intertextuality, underworld

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En attendant Achille (Stace, Achilléide, I, 467-513) : enjeux dramatiques, éthiques et politiques d’une scène « de transition »

François Ripoll

1 En dépit de la floraison récente d’études sur l’Achilléide de Stace, la longue section centrale (397-558) consacrée au moment où les Grecs, rassemblés à Aulis, vont décider d’envoyer une délégation pour aller chercher le jeune héros, a peu retenu l’attention des critiques ; ceux-ci s’intéressent davantage, en effet, aux épisodes d’allure élégiaque et ovidienne consacrés à sa liaison avec Deidamie, au thème de son travestissement et de son ambiguïté sexuelle, ou à la scène dramatique de sa découverte parmi les filles de Lycomède. Cela vient sans doute de ce que l’ambiance néo-homérique de l’épisode d’Aulis tranche avec la couleur alexandrine certes prédominante, mais non exclusive, dans le reste du poème, et qui suscite davantage la sympathie de la critique. Encore faut-il introduire une nuance : la prophétie de Calchas (514-537) a été plus souvent prise en compte que les préparatifs guerriers de l’armée argienne (397-466), et surtout, que la section des v. 467-513, qui fait office de transition entre le catalogue et la scène de divination1.

2 Rappelons la composition de ce passage, que nous nous proposons d’examiner de près. La première partie (467-490) montre l’armée grecque réclamant Achille : celle-ci commence par passer en revue les chefs Achéens éclipsés par le jeune héros dans le cœur des soldats (467-475) ; suit un discours semi-direct reproduisant les propos élogieux des soldats sur Achille (476-482) : son éducation rude (476-478), ses origines divines (479), son immunisation par le Styx (480-481) ; la section se termine sur une comparaison de l’armée suspendue à l’arrivée d’Achille aux Olympiens dans l’attente de l’intervention de Jupiter contre les Géants (483-490). La seconde partie (491-513) met en scène Protésilas interpellant Calchas. A l’évocation de son attitude agressive (491-495)

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succède un discours direct (496-513) : reproches de lenteur à Calchas (496-498) ; passage en revue sur un ton amer des chefs éclipsés par Achille (499-504) ; exhortation pressante à Calchas à révéler la cachette d’Achille (504-509) ; rappel des privilèges du devin et promesse d’honneurs (510-513). Texte et traduction2. Sed quanquam et gemini pariter sua bella capessant Atridae famamque auida uirtute paternam Tydides Sthenelusque premat, nec cogitet annos Antilochus septemque Aiax umbone coruscet armenti reges atque aequum moenibus orbem, consiliisque armisque uigil contendat Vlixes, omnis in absentem belli manus ardet Achillem, nomen Achillis amant et in Hectora solus Achilles poscitur, illum unum Teucris Priamoque loquuntur fatalem : « Quis enim Haemoniis sub uallibus alter creuerit effossa reptans niue ? Cuius adortus cruda rudimenta et teneros formauerit annos Centaurus ? Patrii propior cui linea Caeli, quemue alium Stygios tulerit secreta per amnes Nereis et pulchros ferro praestruxerit artus ? » Haec Graiae castris iterant traduntque cohortes. Cedit turba ducum, uincique haud maesta fatetur. Sic cum pallentes Phlegraea in castra coirent caelicolae iamque Odrysiam Gradiuus in hastam surgeret et Libycos Tritonia tolleret angues ingentemque manu curuaret Delius arcum, stabat anhela metu solum Natura Tonantem respiciens, quando ille hiemes tonitrusque uocaret nubibus, igniferam quot fulmina posceret Aetnen. Atque ibi dum mixta uallati plebe suorum et maris et belli consultant tempora reges, increpitans magno uatem Calchanta tumultu Protesilaus agit – namque huic bellare cupido praecipua et primae iam tunc data gloria mortis - ; « O nimium Phoebi tripodumque oblite tuorum, Thestoride, quando ora deo possessa mouebis iustius, aut quianam Parcarum occulta recludes ? Cernis ut ignotum cuncti stupeantque fremantque Aeaciden ? Sordent uulgo Calydonius heros et magno genitus Telamone Aiaxque secundus, nos quoque ; sed Mauors et Troia arrepta probabunt. Illum neglectis – pudet heu ! – ductoribus omnes belligerum ceu numen amant. Dic ocius, aut cur serta comis et multus honos ? Quibus abditus oris ? Quaue iubes tellure peti ? Nam fama nec antris Chironis, patria nec degere Peleos aula. Heia, inrumpe deos et fata latentia uexa, laurigerosque ignes, si quando, auidissimus hauri ! Arma horrenda tibi saeuosque remisimus enses, numquam has inbelles galea uiolabere uittas, sed felix numeroque ducum praestantior omni, si magnum Danais pro te dependis Achillem. »

Mais si les deux Atrides, d’un même élan, se jettent dans leur guerre, si le fils de Tydée ainsi que Sthénélus cherchent à éclipser la gloire paternelle, si Antiloque

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oublie le nombre de ses années, si Ajax fait étinceler, sur son bouclier, sept rois du troupeau et un orbe aussi vaste que des remparts, si Ulysse, toujours en éveil, est fort de ses conseils et de ses armes, tout entière pour un absent brûle la troupe guerrière : Achille. C’est le nom d’Achille qu’ils chérissent, et c’est, contre Hector, Achille seul que l’on réclame ; lui seul, dit-on, sera fatal aux Troyens et à Priam. Quel autre, au creux des vallées d’Hémonie, a grandi en rampant dans la neige creusée ? Qui d’autre a reçu une rude éducation et a été formé, en ses tendres années, par les leçons d’un Centaure ? De qui le lignage touche-t-il de plus près au Ciel paternel ? Qui d’autre fut porté en secret, dans les ondes stygiennes, par une Néréide, qui protégea du fer son beau corps ? Voilà ce que répètent et propagent dans le camp les cohortes grecques. La foule des chefs s’incline, et sans rancœur s’avoue vaincue. Ainsi lorsqu’aux camps phlégréens s’assemblaient, pâlissants, les habitants du Ciel, que déjà, appuyé sur sa lance odrysienne, Gradivus se dressait, que la Tritonienne brandissait ses serpents libyens, que le bras du Délien courbait son arc immense, alors, haletante d’effroi, la Nature, figée, regardait le seul Tonnant : quand appellerait-il des nuées orages et tonnerre ? Combien de foudres demanderait-il à la forge de l’Etna ? Et tandis qu’entourés de la foule mêlée de leurs hommes, les rois discutent du meilleur temps pour la mer et pour la guerre, Protésilas invective à grand bruit le devin Calchas – domine en lui le désir de la guerre, et déjà lui est donnée la gloire de mourir le premier - : « O Thestoride trop oublieux de Phébus et de tes trépieds, quand ouvriras-tu ta bouche, possédée du dieu, mieux à propos, et quel motif te poussera enfin à révéler les secrets des Parques ? Vois-tu comme tous, sans le connaître, acclament, fascinés, l’Eacide ? La foule n’a que mépris pour le héros de Calydon, pour le fils du grand Télamon, pour le second Ajax, et pour moi aussi ; mais Mars et la prise de Troie prouveront notre valeur. C’est lui que tous, dédaignant (honte à nous !) les grands chefs, chérissent comme une divinité guerrière. Parle au plus vite ; ou à quoi bon cette couronne sur ta tête et tous les honneurs dont tu jouis ? Sur quels rivages se cache-t-il, ou sur quelle terre nous enjoins-tu de le chercher ? Car il ne vit, dit-on, ni dans l’antre de Chiron, ni à la cour de son père Pélée. Allons, fais irruption chez les dieux, harcèle les destins cachés, hume avec plus d’avidité que jamais les feux du laurier ! Nous t’avons exempté des armes redoutables et des cruelles épées, jamais casque ne profanera ces bandelettes pacifiques, mais tu auras le bonheur d’être placé au-dessus de tous les chefs réunis si tu donnes aux Danaens, pour te remplacer, le grand Achille ».

3 Ce passage négligé, dans la mesure précisément où il brasse des thématiques différentes de celles de l’intrigue centrale, permet d’apporter un éclairage complémentaire sur le projet poétique de l’Achilléide et de nuancer l’image un peu monolithique que l’on en donne parfois. J’envisagerai trois axes problématiques : - Le thème de l’attente du héros et l’orchestration de la tension dramatique. - L’introduction et la caractérisation par le discours (éthopée) d’une figure secondaire : Protésilas. - Les enjeux socio-politiques qui sous-tendent la mise en scène de la collectivité guerrière dans ses diverses composantes.

1. L’attente du héros.

4 L’idée de développer ce thème doit dériver indirectement du début du chant IX de l’ Iliade, quand les chefs grecs, mis en difficulté, se rendent compte à quel point Achille leur manque (89-172). Stace y a puisé l’idée fondamentale selon laquelle l’entrée en jeu d’Achille est l’objet d’une vive attente collective, ce qui lui permettait de mettre en valeur la figure de son héros encore enfant en faisant entrevoir proleptiquement à

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travers lui le futur « super-guerrier » iliadique à l’intervention duquel tout le monde serait un jour suspendu. Ce type de jeu allusif par « répétition anticipée » d’une scène homérique est un procédé récurrent de l’Achilléide, qui, en tant que prequel de l’Iliade et de l’Odyssée, cherche à offrir à son lecteur le plaisir de la reconnaissance proleptique3. Toutefois cette influence d’Iliade IX reste à un niveau très général et n’a laissé aucune trace intertextuelle précise dans le texte de Stace. En fait, ce dernier a conçu l’idée, d’une part, de développer cette idée d’attente sous la forme d’une synkrisis antithétique entre Achille et les autres chefs grecs infériorisés par rapport à lui, et d’autre part, de subjectiviser cette synkrisis en la plaçant dans la bouche de la troupe. Or il me semble que ce double parti pris, qui dramatise puissamment la scène de l’attente, a été suggéré au poète de l’Achilléide par un de ses prédécesseurs proches : Valérius Flaccus, chez qui l’on trouve précisément une scène dans laquelle l’attente d’un héros majeur est source de tension dans une scène dominée par les discours4. Il s’agit du débat des Argonautes après la disparition d’Hercule5 (Arg., III, 598-714). Plusieurs éléments semblent indiquer que Stace avait le précédent valérien à l’esprit. D’une part, le mouvement initial par quanquam énumérant les chefs achéens supplantés par Achille (467) rappelle les v. 599-600 de Valérius, où la concessive oppose Hylas, certes apprécié de tous, à Hercule, bien plus regretté que lui (quamquam omnibus aeque/ grata rudimenta). On trouve dans ce même mouvement l’expression Herculeo sub nomine pendent (600), auquel répond ici : nomen Achillis amant (v. 474), avec dans les deux cas, la relance par un illum antéposé voisinant avec le verbe poscere6 ( Ach. 475 : … poscitur, illum… et Arg. 601 : illum… reposcere). La junctura valérienne grata rudimenta (600) a en outre un écho dans le cruda rudimenta de Stace (478), à la même place dans le vers. Plus précisément, le discours de Méléagre chez Valérius a laissé une trace assez nette dans celui de Protésilas : le moment ou le locuteur déroule, sur un ton plus ou moins dépité, un liste de chefs jugés inférieurs au héros principal, en finissant par lui-même, et en promettant des exploits à venir qui prouveront sa propre valeur (500-502 : cf. Arg., III, 667-727). Aussi n’est-ce peut-être pas par hasard que Protésilas désigne Diomède comme Calydonius heros (500), une épithète couramment associée à… Méléagre (cf. VF I, 646 : Magnanimus Calydone satus8). Nous verrons que l’intertexte valérien a aussi été convoqué par Stace pour un motif connexe : le conflit latent que l’attente du héros met à jour au sein de la collectivité (sous une forme nettement atténuée par rapport à Valérius).

5 Sur le plan de la cohésion du récit, Stace était toutefois confronté à une petite difficulté. Le choix de développer le motif de l’attente du héros majeur en prélude à la scène de vaticination impliquait que les Achéens aient déjà de fortes raisons de souhaiter l’entrée en jeu d’Achille préalablement à l’intervention de Calchas. Or d’après la tradition légendaire issue des Chants Cypriens, représentée notamment par les Skyrioi d’Euripide, et reprise par le pseudo-Apollodore (III, 13, 8), c’est une prophétie, parfois attribuée à Calchas, qui avait révélé aux Achéens qu’Achille était indispensable à l’expédition contre Troie (la même prophétie devait, dans les Skyrioi, indiquer le lieu de cachette d’Achille9). Le choix structurel opéré par Stace lui impose de redistribuer la matière de la prophétie de Calchas : les Achéens savent déjà qu’ils ont besoin d’Achille (pour des raisons que je vais préciser dans un instant), et la vaticination de Calchas (qui, du coup, n’est plus à proprement parler une prophétie) leur donnera seulement des indices sur l’endroit où le chercher. On voit donc que chez Stace, l’effet affectif et dramatique dans la mise en scène de l’attente du héros était une suggestion que le poète tenait à developper en elle-même, au prix de quelques aménagements de la tradition légendaire.

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6 C’est aux v. 475-81 que sont exposées les raisons de l’espérance qu’Achille suscite chez les Grecs. La première idée énoncée est celle d’une prédestination d’Achille à la victoire sur Hector et, consécutivement, au renversement de la puissance troyenne. Cette croyance découlait originellement de l’oracle de Calchas ; mais comme Stace, on l’a vu, a décidé de postposer la scène oraculaire, il ne peut plus faire référence à un oracle antérieur. Cette prédestination se trouve dès lors ramenée à un « on-dit » (loquuntur) dont l’origine n’est pas précisée : c’est en fait la tradition littéraire sur Achille tombeur d’Hector et fossoyeur prédestiné de Troie, tradition supposée anachroniquement connue des personnages sous forme d’une vague rumeur, qui est ici le support implicite de la connaissance, comme cela arrive souvent dans la poésie néo-alexandrine10. Mais cette confiance envers celui qui n’est encore qu’un enfant et n’a accompli aucun exploit, si elle n’est pas fondée sur une prophétie en bonne et due forme, doit tout de même être étayée au niveau du récit par des éléments plus objectifs qu’une simple rumeur. C’est le rôle de la séquence en discours indirect libre des v. 476-81, qui équivaut à une laudatio d’Achille, sous la forme d’une quadruple série de questions oratoires (anaphore du pronom interrogatif avec polyptote), fondées sur une base comparative avec variations (quis alter… quem alium), de façon à donner à la primauté d’Achille l’allure d’une évidence censée s’imposer à tous. L’énumération se déploie en trois temps, recoupant tout ce que les Achéens sont supposés savoir du Péléide à ce stade : son éducation (475-79)/ son origine divine (479)/ son immunisation par le Styx (480-82), dans une progression organisée du plus naturel au plus surnaturel. L’éducation d’Achille sous la rude férule de Chiron se fonde sur une tradition bien connue développée notamment dans la troisième Néméenne de Pindare 11. Ici, Stace se limite à deux indications suggestives d’une éducation « à la dure » : une hypotypose concrète (l’enfant rampant dans la neige) et un condensé général et abstrait (le rôle formateur de Chiron). Le premier motif s’inspire directement de l’éducation de l’Arcadien Parthénopée dans la Thébaïde, IX, 79712 (l’enfant rampant sur les fleuves gelés), qui elle-même s’inspirait de l’exposé de Numanus Rémulus sur la rude éducation de la jeunesse italique chez Virgile (Aen. IX, 603-604), prototype du topos épique de l’éducation rigoureuse des peuples primitifs13. La variation par substitution de la neige (dans laquelle l’enfant creuse une sorte de sillon en rampant dessus : effosa reptans niue) aux fleuves glacés s’accorde au cadre Hémonien, lieu de l’enfance d’Achille14, dont le relief montagneux et le climat froid suscitent autour du jeune bébé l’image d’un locus horridus sauvage et oppressant (Haemoniis sub uallibus15). Ce contraste entre la fragilité apparente de l’enfant et la rudesse de sa formation se retrouve dans l’évocation du rôle de Chiron16 (antithèse cruda17/ teneros) ; un Chiron dont l’importance est soulignée par la structure binaire avec antéposition du premier verbe (adortus sous-ent. est), et le rejet du nom qui pointe la nature insolite du magister (Centaurus). Le deuxième motif de la laudatio est le lignage divin du héros, « proche du ciel paternel » (patrii propior… linea18 caeli), ce qui renvoie soit au motif de la quasi-filiation jovienne d’Achille, soit à son trisaïeul paternel Ouranos19, soit les deux à la fois. Après cette double série de considérations (qui recoupe en gros les catégories de l’acquis et de l’inné), la laudatio s’achève sur l’allusion à l’épisode de l’immersion dans le Styx, qui est l’atout le plus spécifique d’Achille. Cette version de l’immunisation d’Achille, d’origine probablement hellénistique, était encore peu répandue à la fin du 1er siècle, et Stace a manifestement contibué à la populariser, à défaut de l’avoir inventée20. Elle est en tout cas mise en relief ici par la métaphore ferro21 praestruxerit, qui évoque l’image d’une cuirasse22, et l’antithèse (soulignée par l’hyperbate) entre la beauté délicate d’Achille (pulchros…

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artus23) et sa vocation guerrière (ferro). Notons l’ironie (involontaire) dans l’allusion finale au rôle protecteur de Thétis : les Grecs qui se félicitent de cette action préservatrice de la Néréide sur son fils ne savent pas encore qu’elle est en train de pousser jusqu’au bout cette logique en cachant Achille à Scyros, au détriment cette fois de leur intérêt (l’adverbe secreto24 appuie l’analogie d’ambiance entre la ruse de Scyros et l’immersion dans le Styx : Thétis agit toujours subrepticement). Cette laudatio des virtualités martiales d’Achille s’achève donc sur une touche involontairement ambiguë. L’intérêt de cette séquence est aussi de délivrer un certain nombre de renseignements sur la petite enfance d’Achille que Stace, pour ne pas commencer son récit ab ouo25, n’a pas inclus dans sa narration initiale. Elle anticipe toutefois le récit plus complet de son enfance que fera Achille au chant II, 86-167, où certains des motifs présents ici seront repris et développés (rôle de Chiron notamment). Parallèlement, les origines de la guerre de Troie qui sont exposées ici seront reprises dans le discours d’Ulysse (II, 49-85). C’est ainsi un double éclairage compémentaire qui est porté obliquement sur les origines à la fois du conflit guerrier et du héros principal26.

7 Après les deux vers conclusifs de ce passage de discours (482-83), la séquence s’achève sur le « point d’orgue » d’une comparaison amplifiante, qui dramatise cette suggestion d’une attente suspendue à l’entrée en scène d’un héros majeur. L’armée achéenne tendue dans l’expectative d’Achille est comparée aux Olympiens attendant la réaction de Jupiter lors de la Gigantomachie. Cette comparaison est un bel exemple de combinaison de sources et de jeu de correspondances multiples comme les aime Stace et l’on peut tenter d’en reconstituer la genèse imaginative27. Le contexte de préparatifs guerriers en vue d’un affrontement d’ampleur planétaire a amené à l’esprit de Stace le souvenir d’une comparaison gigantomachique de Lucain dans un contexte analogue (VII, 145-50). Il lui a emprunté l’idée d’une énumération de dieux olympiens avec pour chacun son attribut typique28 (ce qui fait écho au petit catalogue des chefs achéens des v. 467-72) culminant dans l’évocation de Jupiter (auquel correspond Achille dans le comparé29, ce qui rappelle sa « quasi-filiation jovienne »). En outre, afin de dramatiser l’ambiance de cette comparaison, Stace s’est souvenu d’un passage de Valérius Flaccus (II, 16-20) lié dans sa mémoire à celui de Lucain par le motif gigantomachique commun (avec aussi la mention de Pallène) : il s’agit du motif de la peur collective des dieux30 (cf. Arg. II, 16 : metus ecce deum31). L’introduction de ce motif de la peur, redoublé par l’apparition de Natura, sert ici à accentuer l’ambiance d’attente fébrile en prélude à l’entrée en scène du « numéro un » : Jupiter/ Achille32. Pour exprimer cette idée, Stace a songé à un autre passage de Valérius Flaccus qu’a sans doute appelé à son esprit l’allusion de Lucain à l’action météorologique de Jupiter dans Phars. VII, 151 : la comparaison des Argonautes attaquant les Dolions en rangs serrés à un nuage d’orage dont on ne sait où il va frapper la terre (VF III, 90-94). Stace lui a emprunté le motif du spectateur angoissé dans l’attente de la foudre (en remplaçant les humains par la Nature pour amplifier la résonance cosmique de la scène) ainsi que la structure syntaxique d’ensemble (metu à l’ablatif commandant une double interrogative indirecte paratactique). Le motif de la peur est certes sans correspondant direct dans le comparé (c’est au contraire dans une ambiance d’espérance fervente que les Grecs attendent la venue d’Achille), mais l’analogie se situe sur un plan plus général : celui d’une vive intensité émotionnelle liée à une expectative collective. Au final, cette ample comparaison contribue à prolonger l’attente tout en la dramatisant. On est assez proche ici des effets propres à l’esthétique du Sublime33 : gradation affective culminant sur une touche de tension dramatique exacerbée, mise en jeu de phénomènes

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météorologiques impressionnants (foudre, tonnerre), schèmes de verticalité (surgeret, tolleret), image de grandeur (ingentem), résonance cosmique de l’événement, magnitudo animi d’Achille à l’arrière-plan… Cette recherche des effets sublimes, aux antipodes de l’ambiance esthétique dominante de l’Achilléide, crée un contraste avec les événements de Scyros, ce qui met en valeur une tension interne au caractère du héros principal. Ce même Achille que nous voyons sous les traits charmants d’un puer immature et efféminé de type alexandrin au niveau de la narration principale est en même temps le héros prédestiné d’un univers épique grandiose et tonitruant que ce passage nous fait entrevoir par le biais de la comparaison34. Stace pointe ainsi la dualité de son héros et l’ambivalence du projet épique de l’Achilléide, qui rend hommage à l’épopée « pathétique35 » d’ascendance iliadique tout en circonscrivant son espace quantitatif.

2. La figure de Protésilas.

8 L’entrée en scène de ce personnage à ce stade du récit, sans parallèle connu dans les sources, peut apparaître comme une rallonge superflue, qui ne fait que retarder un peu plus la révélation de Calchas : celui-ci aurait très bien pu entrer en scène immédiatement après le v. 490, sans avoir besoin de se faire aiguillonner par Protésilas pour se décider à entrer en transe. Mais Stace tenait à cette scène, qui lui permet de renforcer l’ambiance de frénésie guerrière dans laquelle baigne tout l’épisode d’Aulis en mettant en scène un caractère individuel synecdotique de l’état d’esprit général. Là encore, l’intéressant est de reconstituer la démarche imaginative du poète. Ayant conçu dès l’origine le projet de faire intervenir une vaticination de Calchas, Stace a immédiatement pensé à la scène de la fausse prophétie du même Calchas dans le récit mensonger de Sinon au chant II de l’Enéide (122-129) : de là vient l’idée d’introduire un chef achéen qui brutalise le devin réticent à délivrer son savoir36 (en remplaçant Ulysse par Protésilas pour des raisons que nous allons préciser). Simultanément, le poète a dû penser aussi à la scène de sa Thébaïde où Capanée invective, pour des raisons analogues, le devin Amphiaraos37 (Theb., III, 598-670), et en a tiré l’idée de donner une seconde fois la parole en discours direct à une figure de guerrier impatient et peu respectueux de la fonction religieuse. Cette scène d’invectives d’un guerrier à un devin se rattache, via la Thébaïde, au thème plus général du guerrier impie outrageant le devin, dont les antécédents, en amont du Capanée statien, sont notamment le Tydée d’Eschyle (Sept., 380-84) et l’Idas d’Apollonios de Rhodes38 (Arg., I, 485-491). On retrouve un peu de cette opposition ancienne du prêtre et du guerrier dans les v. 510-511, où Protésilas souligne le caractère imbellis du devin (nous y reviendrons). Mais l’ Achilléide présente une version très atténuée de ce topos, dans la mesure où Protésilas, s’il manifeste un tempérament emporté et agressif, n’est pas vraiment un impie, et ne met pas réellement en doute la compétence de Calchas. Par ailleurs, pour étoffer le discours exhortatif du guerrier, Stace a songé à nouveau au discours de Méléagre chez Valérius Flaccus, en reprenant (sous une forme certes très atténuée) l’idée d’une jalousie latente du locuteur envers le héros que tous appellent (là, Hercule ; ici, Achille) ; de là vient le mouvement des v. 500-504, ou le locuteur passe en revue les autres chefs mésestimés en finissant par lui-même, avec la promesse d’exploits à venir : cf. VF III, 667-72. Quant au choix du héros chargé ici d’invectiver le uates, Stace a eu une idée que l’on peut qualifier d’originale : celle de confier ce rôle à Protésilas. Rien dans la tradition mythique relative à ce personnage ne le mettait en conflit direct avec Calchas39, mais le choix s’explique à la fois par des considérations éthiques (ce guerrier

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traditionnellement belliqueux et impatient était ici plus convaincant que le prudent Ulysse dans le rôle du rudoyeur de devin), et par l’exploitation de l’ironie tragique : ce héros si pressé d’en découdre sera le premier à succomber devant Troie, sans pouvoir réaliser sa promesse du v. 502. Or l’ironie proleptique (le plus souvent souriante, mais tragique ici) est un procédé typique d’un prequel que l’on retrouve ailleurs dans l’ Achilléide40. Protésilas est donc représentatif d’une attitude profondément humaine et courante vis-à-vis de la divination, faite de fébrilité anxieuse et d’impatience vaine, en homme qui se précipite tête baissée vers un destin bien éloigné de ses propres attentes. Procédons maintenant à l’analyse suivie du discours.

9 L’exorde (496-98) contamine Theb. VII, 547 (heu nimium… oblite tuorum) pour le ton de reproche et Theb. VIII, 117 (tripodum iam non memimisse meorum) pour le motif du devin oubliant sa spécialité41 (avec ici, effet de surenchère par l’ajout de Phoebi) ; la contamination vise à outrager le devin en mettant directement en cause sa compétence professionnelle sur un ton mordant. La double interrogative qui suit induit, en même temps qu’une progression diachronique anticipant sur l’énonciation de la prophétie, un effet de crescendo dans l’impatience et l’exaspération42.

10 Protésilas aborde ensuite ce qui correspondrait, dans un discours persuasif, à la narratio (499-504). Cela prend la forme d’une hypotypose de l’armée suspendue dans l’attente d’Achille qui reprend avec un effet d’écho et de variation les v. 467-75. Le redoublement verbal avec polysyndète (stupeantque fremantque) souligne l’enthousiasme collectif. L’oxymore qu’il forme avec ignotum, mis en valeur par l’hyperbate, suggère le paradoxe de cette popularité d’un point de vue « aristocratique » (qui est celui de Protésilas). D’où la métaphore hyperbolique sordent qui traduit une pointe de dépit, relancée par l’exclamation en incise pudet heu et reprise in fine par l’ablatif absolu neglectis ductoribus (503). L’énumération de chefs grecs que déroule Protésilas fait écho à celle des v. 468-72 avec quelques variations (ici : Diomède, les deux Ajax, Protésilas lui-même, c’est-à-dire pour l’essentiel des figures plus spécialisées dans la prouesse guerrière que précédemment), et un ton emphatique (périphrases) censé renforcer le contraste entre la gloire de ces grands chefs et le mépris dont ils sont l’objet. La déclaration pleine de fiducia du v. 502 fait retentir, par le biais du zeugma (Mauors et Troia arrepta43), les prétentions épiques du personnage frappées par avance d’ironie tragique. Le mouvement récapitulatif des v. 503-504 constitue le climax de la séquence en esquissant l’idée d’une quasi divinisation d’Achille par la troupe, en un mouvement inspiré de Lucain, VI, 253-5444.

11 Vient ensuite la confirmatio (504-509). Le retour à la structure exhortative (impératif lapidaire : dic ocius) rappelle l’impatience du locuteur, prolongée via le mouvement alternatif (aut cur…) d’une question oratoire qui esquisse une feinte mise en doute de la compétence du devin (appuyée sur le zeugma et rendue plus pressante par l’ellipse verbale). Cela rappelle l’invective du v. 496, et relance le questionnement avec une insistance accrue. Dans les v. 505-506, la question se fait plus précise ; à travers la double interrogative directe avec redondance (quibus… oris/ quaue… tellure), c’est bien le lieu où se trouve Achille plus que son destin qui est en question, comme l’appuie la confirmation par l’état de la rumeur aux v. 506-507 (fama : cf. loquuntur) : cette précision en incise fait gagner du temps au récit en présentant comme révolue l’étape de l’enquête à Phthie et sur le Pélion, au prix d’une ellipse narrative, pour tourner la quête à venir vers les rivages lointaines. La mise hors de cause des deux figures paternelles (Chiron et Pélée45) laisse pressentir en filigrane le caractère féminin et

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maternel de la dissimulation d’Achille, que la prophétie de Calchas confirmera. Ce discours prépare donc bien la voie à la vaticination de ce dernier, en circonscrivant par avance le champ de la révélation attendue. Après cette courte digression explicative, la structure exhortative reprend avec vigueur dans un tricolon ascendant (508-509) avec progression du général et particulier et de l’abstrait au concret, pour dépeindre la pratique de la mantique à laquelle Calchas est prié de s’adonner activement. La première partie du tricolon (irrumpe deos) est une brachylogie inspirée de Theb. III, 634 (superumque irrumpere coetus) et 549 (irrupisse uolantum concilia), dans le même contexte ; l’idée est celle d’un « coup de force » du devin en pleine assemblée divine comme métaphore violente de la pratique divinatoire. La seconde exhortation prolonge avec variation (substitution de fata à deos) l’isotopie guerrière sous-jacente de l’image précédente (irrumpere, uexare) : au yeux de ce va-t-en-guerre invétéré qu’est Protésilas, l’activité divinatoire apparaît comme une opération militaire : la « prise d’assaut » de la « place forte » divine. La troisième exhortation revient à un registre plus religieux, mais avec une vigoureuse brachylogie (ignes… hauri au sens de « absorbe les vapeurs sacrées46 »), appuyée d’une hyperbole (auidissimus) et d’une junctura solennelle et apparemment originale (laurigeros47 ignes). Malgré la vigueur des images, le ton se fait moins agressif en cette fin de discours : Protésilas ne feint plus de mettre en cause la compétence de Calchas, mais l’invite à donner la pleine mesure de celle-ci, et affiche même, par le biais de ses métaphores, une confiance hyperbolique dans le pouvoir de la divination.

12 La péroraison du discours (510-13) abandonne ainsi logiquement le ton de l’exhortation agressive pour développer a contrario une promesse de récompense : Protésilas se rend compte que la persuasion est plus productive que les menaces. Aussi son raisonnement prend-il ici l’aspect d’un enthymème : « nous t’avons déjà accordé une faveur parce que tu nous es utile comme devin (prémisse majeure)/ or si tu nous amènes Achille tu nous seras encore plus utile (prémisse mineure semi-implicite)/ tu recevras donc une récompense honorifique plus grande encore (conclusion) ». On retrouve ici sur un mode plus positif l’allusion aux attributs de la prêtrise et aux honneurs que l’on avait aux v. 505 ; non plus pour désormais en contester la légitimité, mais au contraire pour les confirmer. Le ton est aussi plus apaisé, et les séquences plus amples : Protésilas semble décidé à mettre en sourdine son irritation pour mettre le devin dans de bonnes dispositions. Cette dernière séquence repose sur une problématisation implicite du statut des devins dans l’épopée gréco-latine. Alors que dans l’épopée grecque, les devins sont rarement des combattants48, c’est au contraire monnaie courante chez les épiques latins49. Protésilas s’appuie donc sur la norme implicite de ces derniers pour présenter comme un régime de faveur découlant de la bienveillance des duces achéens (remisimus) l’exemption de service de Calchas, allant jusqu’à adopter, pour parler au non-combattant qu’est le devin, un vocabulaire « pacifiste » censé lui faire mieux apprécier cette faveur (arma horrenda, saeuos enses, imbelles uittas). Mais ce rappel sert surtout de tremplin à la promesse finale, ou, dans un mouvement de surenchère, Protésilas fait miroiter une reconnaissance morale exceptionnelle à Calchas en cas de contribution décisive à la découverte d’Achille. A l’aune de l’éthique aristocratique dont se réclame le locuteur, la perspective de se voir investi d’un prestige supérieur aux duces (numeroque ducum praestantior omni50) est censée apparaître aux yeux de son destinataire comme la récompense suprême. Cohérent avec son ethos martial, Protésilas métaphorise cette contribution de Calchas (l’apport d’Achille à l’armée) par l’image de la fourniture d’un remplaçant militaire (pro te dependis51), tout en faisant sentir la

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disproportion de l’échange (hyperbate emphatique magnum… Achillen encadrant le vers, par contraste avec la brièveté du pronom monosyllabique te désignant Calchas au milieu du vers) : le remplaçant est bien supérieur au remplacé en valeur militaire ; ultime touche de condescendance ironique de la part de cet aristocrate guerrier qu’est Protésilas face au prêtre non-combattant.

13 Le discours dessine donc avec vigueur, sous la forme de l’éthopée, le caractère d’un guerrier (un peu trop) sûr de sa valeur et imprégné de mentalité aristocratique, sans trop de respect pour les prêtres, mais néanmoins confiant dans le pouvoir de la divination : un ethos aisément superposable à la figure de Protésilas pour le peu que la tradition légendaire laissait entrevoir de lui (sa hâte malheureuse à courir au combat), moyennant une petite dose d’extrapolation. Dans le contexte du chant I de l’Achilléide, ce personnage joue le rôle d’une incarnation hyperbolique de l’idéal épique, porte- parole de valeurs héroïques aux antipodes de celles de Thétis avec qui il forme un violent contraste. La peinture de ce caractère emblématique renforce donc le jeu de contrepoint entre l’univers féminin, pacifique et élégiaque de Scyros qui imprègne la majorité du chant I et l’intermède viriliste, belliqueux et iliadique d’Aulis : deux polarités entre lesquelles se trouve tendu le destin d’Achille.

3. La portée politique de la scène.

14 L’Achilléide ne comporte vraisemblablement pas une visée délibérée d’allégorie politique à la manière de l’Enéide ou de la Pharsale, voire de la Thébaïde ou des Punica, et il n’est pas question ici d’en proposer une « lecture à clés » à base d’éloge ou de critique du pouvoir impérial, voire, suivant une ligne interprétative plus en faveur actuellement, de speculum principis. Toutefois, même dans une épopée « apolitique » dans son principe général, les réalités de la politique romaine peuvent se faire jour ponctuellement et en filigrane pour évoquer de façon vivante et parlante aux yeux du lecteur les enjeux de pouvoir ou de conflit au sein des collectivités que la trame narrative permet d’effleurer. Il me semble que c’est ce qui se passe dans cette scène, où les enjeux de l’attente d’Achille prennent, sous la plume de Stace, une coloration plus politique qu’on ne pourrait s’y attendre, et qui nous amène assez loin, pour le coup, du modèle homérique.

15 Prenons le début de l’épisode, qui nous dépeint la popularité d’Achille au sein de l’armée (laquelle, rappelons-le, se confond avec le corps civique dans une perspective romaine). Le premier mouvement (467-477) est une ample phrase périodique fondée sur une antithèse dissymétrique : d’abord, une énumération des principaux chefs argiens (au nombre de sept52) et de leurs attributs dans une concessive en cinq parties avec la mise en valeur des noms propres par le jeu des rejets et enjambements (467-72) ; puis, une principale en quatre temps axée sur la mise en valeur du nom d’Achille répété trois fois53 (polyptote, anadiplose) et repris par illum, avec variation verbale (trois verbes à la 3e pers. plur. encadrant un passif personnel) : une structure qui oppose les chefs pris individuellement à Achille soutenu par la troupe. La première partie permet de dérouler un mini-catalogue des chefs que Stace, contrairement à l’habitude épique, dissocie du catalogue des troupes achéennes qui a précédé. Chacun des cinq chefs ou groupes de chefs est caractérisé par un trait emblématique qui renvoie allusivement à l’ Iliade de façon à créer autour de ces héros une ambiance « hyper-homérique ». Agamemnon et Ménélas (Atridae) sont caractérisés par leur solidarité étroite (pariter,

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sua bella) et leur empressement belliqueux (capessere), prolongeant l’idée iliadique selon laquelle l’aîné fait pleinement siens les griefs du cadet qui sont à l’origine de la guerre ; une idée abondamment illustrée plus haut (399-401). Le second « couple », Diomède et Sthénélus, réunit deux héros souvent associés dans l’Iliade54 (le second est le cocher du premier) et liés notamment par l’appartenance de leurs pères respectifs (Tydée et Capanée) à l’expédition des Sept contre Thèbes ; le motif de l’émulation de la fama paternelle qui est leur caractéristique commune, mis en valeur par l’hypallage (auida uirtute) et par la métaphore inhabituelle à valeur conative (premat55), recoupe un motif traditionnel : le souci des Epigones d’égaler leurs pères56. L’allusion à la jeunesse d’Antiloque dont la valeur n’attend pas le nombre des années renvoie aussi à un motif iliadique (cf. Il. XV, 569). L’ecphrasis de bouclier qui est raccrochée à l’évocation d’Ajax est une allusion à un passage fameux de l’Iliade, VII, 219-220 dont Stace s’inspire de très près (aequantem moenibus orbem57), rehaussée par une périphrase emphatique (armenti reges58). Ulysse, qui arrive au climax de cette énumération septénaire pour annoncer son rôle ultérieur dans l’histoire, présente un concentré de mots renvoyant à ses caractéristiques homériques : l’éveil permanent (uigil59), et l’alliance de compétences guerrières et intellectuelles qui rappelle les préliminaires de la Dolonie (cf. Il., X, 242-47). Bref, pour tous ces chefs, une énumération catalogique de traits homériques, et plus précisément iliadiques, dont l’accumulation emphatique offre un contraste brutal avec leur « dévaluation » face à la popularité du seul Achille.

16 Celle-ci est développée d’abord dans une principale quaternaire subdivisée en deux groupes binaires. Les deux premières séquences dénotent simplement la popularité du héros, avec variation verbale (ardet/ amant60) et en insistant sur le paradoxe d’une popularité in absentia : in absentem… Achillen, nomen Achillis. La triple anaphore avec polyptote du nom propre matérialise ce sentiment populaire à l’instar d’une acclamation par le peuple en armes ; une idée qu’évoque aussi, dans le discours de Protésilas, le verbe fremere (499). En outre, cette popularité se fonde, on l’a vu, sur une combinaison de uirtus et d’ascendance divine (479), ce qui rappelle les fondements de la légitimité impériale julio-claudienne61. Cet Achille est un peu comme un jeune prince d’une maison impériale, spontanément aimé de la troupe, et dont la légitimité repose essentiellement sur des virtualités, dont l’appartenance à une dynastie prestigieuse est l’un des éléments. Enfin, cette popularité tend vers une adoration quasi religieuse d’Achille en tant que numen (504), en laquelle on peut voir une sorte d’esquisse préfigurative du culte impérial.

17 Cependant la popularité de ce héros à la fois juvénile et déjà jupitérien (cf. v. 488) n’est pas sans susciter, au moins potentiellement, un conflit larvé au sein de la communauté. L’idée procède indirectement du passage de Valérius sur l’abandon d’Hercule, dont nous avons vu qu’il est l’une des sources d’inspiration premières de cet épisode. Mais ce qui chez Valérius relèvait d’une rivalité personnelle entre héros (Méléagre vs Hercule) devient, chez Stace, une source de tension « socio-politique » : le poète souligne bien que d’abord c’est la troupe (473 : manus ; 482 : cohortes) qui appelle Achille, et le préfère à ses propres chefs. Cette troupe apparaît comme le vecteur d’une sorte de vox populi qu’elle diffuse horizontalement (482 : haec Graiae castris iterant traduntque cohortes), et exerce, par sa masse où se mêlent indistinctement les différents contingents, une forme de pression quasi physique sur les délibérations des chefs (492 : mixta uallati plebe suorum). Ceux-ci ne semblent réagir que dans un second temps, pour avaliser le choix de leurs soldats (483 : cedit turba ducum uincique… fatetur). Même si les rois font montre d’un indéniable fair-play dans l’acceptation de la préférence populaire (haud maesta),

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l’impression est que l’on aurait bel et bien frôlé une sédition au cas (improbable) où ils auraient décidé de se passer d’Achille, comme les Argonautes l’ont fait avec Hercule. Cette tension latente ressort aussi du discours de Protésilas, porte-parole de cette aristocratie guerrière, qui, en reprenant le catalogue des rois infériorisés (500-502), n’est pas sans laisser entrevoir une pointe de jalousie (inspirée du Méléagre de Valérius) face à cette préférence populaire pour l’Eacide. Pourquoi Stace a-t-il jugé intéressant de développer ces suggestions ? Certes, la mise en scène d’une forme de tension entre les chefs et la troupe au sein de l’armée a des antécédents iliadiques (cf. Il. II, 200-277), mais la façon statienne d’aborder le problème est radicalement différente de l’approche homérique, assez brutalement pro-aristocratique62. De fait, Stace n’écrit pas pour les Grecs de l’époque archaïque, mais pour les Romains de son temps. Ce qu’il met en scène est une société dans laquelle le peuple63 nourrit une faveur particulière pour un chef unique et prestigieux de nature semi-divine, par dessus-la tête des différents rois achéens. Ceux-ci sont dès lors ravalés au rang d’une aristocratie censée reconnaître de bon gré sa subordination au leader charismatique. Et de fait, c’est ce qu’ils font, d’assez bonne grâce dans l’ensemble, puisque même Protésilas, qui apparaît comme le représentant le plus coruscant de la mentalité aristocratique, ne conteste pas ouvertement cette situation : ce qui compte par-dessus tout est la réussite de l’entreprise commune, pour laquelle les individus sont prêts à mettre sous le boisseau leurs susceptibilités personnelles, comme il est de règle dans une société bien structurée. C’est cette bonne volonté de l’aristocratie à ratifier le jugement du peuple en armes qui désamorce les tensions potentielles et garantit in fine la cohésion de la communauté. On assiste donc ici à une réinterprétation quelque peu « césarienne » de la société homérique en même temps qu’à une ébauche du culte de la personnalité impériale. Cette démonstration n’est évidemment pas le propos essentiel de l’Achilléide, mais l’on peut dire que Stace a saisi l’occasion que lui donnait la scène d’assemblée de développer un embryon de réflexion politique qu’il savait de nature à trouver un écho dans son lectorat. Voulant faire ressentir l’auctoritas supérieure dont un héros encore « virtuel » peut être investi par une collectivité par ailleurs riche en grands capitaines, il a redessiné la société homérique sous les traits de la cité romaine de son temps, où ce type d’investiture correspond à une réalité désormais bien admise. Au bout du compte, ce n’est pas tant Achille qui représente l’empereur, comme on l’a dit parfois, que l’image de l’empereur qui est récupérée pour mieux faire sentir le charisme pré- héroïque d’Achille.

18 Je voudrais, pour conclure, reprendre la notion de contrepoint, que j’ai mentionnée plus haut, pour caractériser le rapport de ce passage avec la trame principale. Intermède guerrier et néo-homérique au sein de la narration alexandrinisante et à tendance élégiaque de la jeunesse d’Achille, l’épisode d’Aulis impose sa tonalité véhémente et grandiloquente, avec une présence ponctuelle du sublime (la comparaison des v. 484-90) sous la forme d’une « mineure » opposée à la « majeure » de l’épisode scyrien. Cette variété des tonalités, avec un dosage inégal sur le plan quantitatif, est constitutive d’une esthétique de la poikilia qui est un élément essentiel de la personnalité poétique de l’Achilléide64 : une épopée qu’on veut trop souvent réduire à sa composante élégiaque et sentimentalisante (tout en prédisant parfois, de façon tout aussi exagérée à mon avis, un basculement intégral dans la fureur et le pathos iliadiques à partir du chant II). C’est pourquoi je suis d’avis que, indépendamment des sujets qui devaient être abordés dans la suite de l’Achilléide, (l’amour, ou la guerre, ou les deux à la fois) cette technique du contrepoint devait

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rester une caractéristique constante de l’œuvre, avec une tonalité dominante détendue et plaisante, et quelques « poussées de tension » pathétiques et sublimes, d’autant plus frappantes que parcimonieusement distribuées d’une part, et surtout, nettement circonscrites et de courte durée d’autre part. En effet, une autre caractéristique de l’ Achilléide, au sein même de cet épisode martial d’Aulis, est le parti pris de dédramatisation65. Contrairement à l’Iliade, les passions et les tensions n’y arrivent jamais à un point de rupture : les chefs achéens cèdent de bon gré à la préférence de la troupe, et Protésilas finit son discours d’exhortation à Calchas sur un ton plus conciliant qu’il ne l’avait commencé. Epopée « éthique » est l’Achilléide, épopée éthique elle reste, et nous retombons bien, in fine, dans la sphère des adfectus mites atque compositi caractéristiques de cet univers poétique, comme le dit Quintilien66 (Inst. Or., VI, 2, 9). Stace met en place dans cette scène une situation virtuellement porteuse de tensions et renvoyant allusivement à des moments d’affrontement parfois vif chez ses modèles épiques (la scène d’assemblée d’Il. II, le débat entre Méléagre et Télamon chez Val. Fl. III, la scène entre Capanée et Amphiaraos dans Theb. III) pour mieux en désarmorcer les potentialités conflictuelles grâce à la bonne volonté de ses personnages. De même, Lycomède se calme assez vite après s’être rendu compte qu’il avait été dupé (I, 912-18), et le regret d’Achille après sa séparation d’avec Déidamie est de courte durée (II, 27-32). Un autre exemple de « dégonflage » d’une situation de crise mise en place notamment par un jeu d’allusivité intertextuelle est la scène initiale (20-94), où la démarche de Thétis auprès de Neptune pour engloutir la nef de Pâris semble annoncer une tempête épique analogue à celle suscitée par Junon contre Enée au chant I de l’Enéide, avant que les intentions agressives de la Néréide ne viennent butter de façon déceptive contre l’anti-interventionnisme du dieu des mers (cf. 95-98). A côté de l’esthétique du contrepoint dont j’ai parlé, ces exemples permettent aussi de parler d’une esthétique du decrescendo, qui est une autre originalité de l’Achilléide dans le paysage épique latin.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

ARICÒ 1986 : G. Aricò, « l’Achilleide di Stazio : tradizione letteraria e invenzione narrativa », ANRW II. 32. 5, 1986, p. 2925-2964.

BARCHIESI 1996 : A. Barchiesi, « La guerra di Troia non avrà luogo : il proemio dell’Achilleide di Stazio », AION (filol) 18, 1996, p. 45-62.

BESSONE 2016 : F. Bessone, « The Hero’ Extended Family : Familial and Narrative Tensions in Statius’ Achilleid », in Family in Flavian Epic, N. Manioti ed., Leiden-Boston, 2016, p. 174-208.

BITTO 2016 : G. Bitto, Vergimus in senium : Statius’ Achilleis als Alterswerk, Göttingen, 2016.

DELARUE 2000 : F. Delarue, Stace poète épique. Originalité et cohérence, Louvain-Paris 2000.

DILKE 1954 : O. A. W. Dilke, Statius. Achilleid. Edited with Introduction and Commentary, Cambridge 1954.

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FANTHAM 1999 : E. Fantham, « Chironis Exemplum : On Teachers and Surrogate Fathers in Achilleid and Silvae », Hermathena 67, 1999, p. 59-70.

FEENEY 2004 : « Tenui… latens discrimine : Spotting the Differencies in Statius’ Achilleid », MD 52, 2004, p. 85-105.

HARDIE 2013 ; Ph. Hardie, « Flavian Epic and the Sublime », in Flavian Epic Interactions, G. Manuwald & A. Voigt eds, Berlin, 2013, p. 125-138.

HESLIN 2005 : P. J. Heslin, The Transvestite Achilles. Genre and Gender in the Achilleid, Cambridge, 2005.

MÉHEUST 1971 : Stace. Achilléide. Texte établi et traduit par J. Méheust, Paris, 1971.

MOUL 2012 : V. Moul, « Quo rapis ? Tone and Allusion at Aulis in Statius’Achilleid », CQ 62, 2012, p. 286-300.

NUZZO 2012 : G. Nuzzo, Publio Papinio Stazio. Achilleide, Palerme 2012.

PARKES 2008 : « The Return of the Seven : Allusion to the Thebaid in Statius’ Achilleid », AJPh 129, 2008, p. 381-402.

PARKES 2014 : « The Epics of Statius and Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica », in Brill’s Companion to Valerius Flaccus, M. Heerink & G. Manuwald eds, Leiden-Boston, 2014, p. 326-339.

RIPOLL-SOUBIRAN 2008 : F. Ripoll et J. Soubiran, Stace. Achilléide. Louvain-Paris-Dudley, Ma, 2008.

RIPOLL 2010 : F. Ripoll, « La guerre de Troie dans l’Achilléide de Stace », Rursus-Spicae [En ligne], 5 | 2010, mis en ligne le 11 mars 2010. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rursus/413.

RIPOLL 2014 : F. Ripoll, « Mémoire de Valérius Flaccus dans l’Achilléide de Stace », REA 116, 2014, p. 83-103.

ROSATI 1992 : G. Rosati, « L’Achilleide di Stazio, un’epica dell’ambiguità », Maia 44, 1992, p. 233-266.

SÉCHAN 1953 ; L. Séchan, « La légende de Protésilas », BAGB Lettres d’humanité 12, 1953, p. 3-27.

NOTES

1. Pour une approche générale de l’épisode, voir principalement Bitto 2016, p. 266-274. 2. Le texte suivi ici est tiré de Ripoll-Soubiran 2008. La traduction est personnelle. 3. Par exemple, la désignation d’Ulysse et Diomède comme ambassadeurs (536-59) est une « préfiguration a posteriori » de la Dolonie homérique (Il. X, 218-53) ; de même la réception d’Ulysse chez Lycomède (726-840) annonce par certains traits celle d’Ulysse chez Alcinous aux chants VII-VIII de l’Odyssée. 4. Sur la présence de Valérius Flaccus dans l’Achilléide en général, voir Parkes 2014 et Ripoll 2014. 5. Un épisode que le poète flavien avait considérablement amplifié par rapport à Apollonios (I, 1274-1344). 6. Variation sur le motif aliquem solum in certamina poscere, fréquent dans l’épopée, notamment (mais pas exclusivement) dans des contextes de défi : cf. Aen., IX, 439 ; X, 662 ; XII, 467 ; Theb, XI, 245 ; Ach., I, 922. 7. Le modèle, en amont de Valérius, est le discours de Turnus chez Virgile, Aen., XI, 428-440, mais Stace est plus près de Valérius que de Virgile du fait de la présence latente, dans les deux cas, d’une figure de héros absent et populaire en antithèse à cette revue de chefs.

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8. C’est en fait c’est l’ensemble des v 500-501 de Stace qui été influencé par Valérius : Calydonius heros/ et magno genitus Telamone. 9. Sur l’influence des Skyrioi dans l’Achilléide, voir notamment Aricò 1986. 10. Ulysse parlera plus loin à ce propos (II, 33) d’oracles dont il n’aura pas été question auparavant, mais qui renvoient à la tradition issue des Chants Cypriens (cf. aussi, en plus vague II, 57) ; ce qui montre bien que la cohérence narrative dans le détail est un souci très secondaire du poète : en bon élève des Alexandrins, il n’hésite pas à faire ressurgir à un autre moment du récit (pour des raisons spécifiques à ce moment-là) une version du mythe qu’il a écartée dans la narration principale (pour des raisons elles aussi spécifiques). 11. Voir note ad loc de Ripoll-Soubiran 2008. 12. Adstrictos didici reptare per amnes. 13. Cf. le discours du Scythe Gésandre chez Valérius, VI, 325 et 335-37. 14. Cf. aussi Val. Fl., VI, 325 : altricemque niuem. 15. Cf. Ov., Met., VII, 264. 16. Sur le rôle formateur de Chiron dans l’Achilléide et notamment la tension entre rudesse militaire et tendresse quasi maternelle, voir Fantham 1999 et Bessone 2016 (spécialement p. 177-84). 17. Cruda rudimenta est une variation sur la junctura virgilienne à coloration militaire dura rudimenta (Aen. XI, 156), sans doute amenée à l’esprit du poète par la médiation de Valérius III, 600 (grata rudimenta), dans un passage dont nous avons plus haut que Stace s’en était inspiré sur un plan plus général. La variatio : cruda au lieu de dura est peut-être une allusion oblique à la tradition sur l’alimentation d’Achille à base d’entrailles d’animaux vivants (cf. Ripoll-Soubiran, p. 292 pour les réf. et la bibliogr.). 18. Première attestation de ce mot après Silv., III, 44 au sens de « lignage ». 19. Voir Ripoll-Soubiran 2008, p. 151-52 à propos de I, 2 (patrio caelo). 20. Voir aussi v. 134 (avec la note ad loc de Ripoll-Soubiran 2008, p. 174) et 269. Cette version a fini par supplanter la version traditionnelle de l’immunisation par le feu. 21. Datif de destination ici. 22. Probable allusion oblique à l’armure forgée pour Achille par Héphaïstos à la demande de Thétis (Il., XVIII, 458-61). 23. Cf. Aen., IX, 433. 24. Souvenir de la version selon laquelle Thétis effectuait les rites d’immunisation d’Achille (en l’occurrence par le feu) à l’insu de Pélée (cf. Ap. Rhod., IV, 869-75). 25. Cf. Ripoll-Soubiran, p. 14-15. 26. Sur cet effet d’entrecroisement, voir Ripoll 2010. 27. Voir Ripoll 2014, p. 90-92. 28. Ces trois dieux figuraient chez Lucain, VII, 145-50 (cf. en amont Hor., Od., III, 55-64 et Etna, 61-63). L’image imposante de Mars dressé avec sa lance prolonge des expressions virgiliennes analogues avec l’épée ou le bouclier (Aen., IX, 749 ; XII, 720 ; XI, 284). L’image des serpents dressés de l’égide de Pallas continue cette idée de verticalité (surgeret/ tolleret). Quant à l’image d’Apollon bandant son arc contre les ennemis (qui apporte une variation avec l’idée de courbure), elle rappelle l’ecphrasis de la bataille d’Actium, Aen., VIII, 704, contaminée pour l’expression avec Ov., Am., III, 3, 29. 29. On est donc dans une comparaison à correspondances multiples, comme les aime Stace : Jupiter = Achille ; les chefs grecs = les dieux olympiens (sur un plan général) ; et implicitement, les Géants = les Troyens. 30. Valérius lui-même s’est sans doute souvenu, pour le motif de la peur des dieux, d’Ovide, Met., V, 322 (je remercie G. Rosati pour cette suggestion). En amont, on peut citer aussi Horace, Od., III, 4, 49 et Etna, 54 (peur de Jupiter menacé par l’attaque des Géants). Stace infléchit la suggestion de

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la peur collective en la reportant sur les autres dieux, pour mieux détacher la figure souveraine de Jupiter. 31. Ce précédent est une puissante raison de maintenir au v. 484 la leçon pallentes, que certains (Willamowitz) suggèrent de corriger en Pallenes (nom de la presqu’île où se situe la Gigantomachie) en pensant notamment à Luc., VII, 150 et VF II, 17 où figure ce nom. Mais il n’est pas impossible que l’allusion à Pallène dans ce passage de Valérius et/ ou de Lucain ait donné l’idée à Stace, par paronomase, de traduire la peur des dieux par le participe pallentes, avec peut- être l’esquisse d’un jeu de mots (Soubiran). 32. Sur l’association entre Jupiter et Achille, et la tension liée à ce motif dès le prologue (1-2), voir Barchiesi 1996. 33. Sur le Sublime dans l’épopée flavienne, voir en dernier lieu Hardie 2013. 34. Cf. les paroles de Chiron en I, 147-152. Voir à ce propos Bessone 2016, p. 183 et Heslin 1005, p. 296. 35. Sur l’Achilléide comme épopée « éthique » par opposition à l’épopée « pathétique », voir Delarue 2000, p. 191-231. 36. Notamment, pour le v. 493, cf. Aen II, 122 : Hic Ithacus uatem magno Calchanta tumultu/ protrahit in medios. Cela rejoint, en amont, le motif traditionnel du devin qui doit subir une contrainte violente pour délivrer sa prophétie (cf. la figure de Protée et le Silène de la 6e Buc.). 37. Cf. notamment : heu pudeat (Theb. III, 609) et pudet heu (Ach. I, 503). Pour un parallèle détaillé, voir Bitto 2016, p. 269-74. Sur ce parallélisme et sur les réminiscences de la Thébaïde dans l’ Achilléide de façon plus générale, voir Parkes 2008. 38. Cf. aussi, plus ponctuellement, Agamemnon face à Chrysès, Il., I, 28. 39. Voir Séchan 1953. 40. Cf. par ex. l’allusion (involontaire) d’Ulysse au début de l’Odyssée (Od., I, 3) en I, 785-87. 41. Mouvements analogues chez Virg., Aen. IV, 267 ; Ov. Her., I, 41 ; Sil. Pun., XII, 69. 42. Pour le choix de la leçon quianam… recludes et son interprétation, voir Ripoll-Soubiran, 2008 p. 222. A l’appui de l’interprétation de J. Soubiran, j’ajouterais que le mouvement des vv. 497-498 n’est pas un vrai questionnement, mais un mouvement rhétorique traduisant l’exaspération de Protésilas. Outre le fait que la leçon quaenam (« quels secrets révèleras-tu ? ») ressemble à une correction banalisante, cela introduit une dissymétrie en posant, pour le coup, une vraie question, d’où un effet d’anticlimax inadéquat avec le mouvement de l’ensemble (aggravé d’une platitude). De même, l’interprétation de quianam recludis (en corrigeant, comme le suggèrent certains éditeurs, recludes en recludis et en prenant ce verbe au sens, plus rare, de « cacher ») par « pourquoi caches-tu » aboutit aussi à une platitude. Je pense en fait que la deuxième question redouble la première en franchissant un degré supplémentaire dans l’exaspération de Protésilas ; le sens est donc : « pour quel meilleur motif (sous-entendu : que celui-ci) révèras-tu… » (iustius est en fait commun aux deux questions ; c’est l’interprétation de Brinkgreve, récusée sans argument valable par Dilke mais reprise par Méheust et Soubiran). D’autre part, le « aut » suggère que la deuxième question va dans le même sens que la première avec qui elle constitue une redondance rhétorique doublée d’un effet de surenchère. 43. Pour le choix de arrepta au lieu de abrepta, voir Ripoll-Soubiran 2008, p. 222-23. 44. Adulation des soldats de Scaeva pour leur chef : ac uelut… numen/ et uiuam magnae speciem Virtutis adorant. 45. Notons au passage que les deux hypothèses envisagées par Protésilas renvoient aux deux versions concurrentes sur l’enfance du héros : d’une part, celle d’Homère (Il., XVIII, 57-60 ; XI, 485-95), selon laquelle Achille a été élevé dans le palais de son père, et d’autre part, la vulgate issue des Chants Cypriens et représentée notamment par Apollonios de Rhodes (IV, 852-81), selon laquelle il a été confié entièrement à la garde de Chiron ; c’est la seconde que Stace choisit de suivre dans la narration principale, mais il fait ici une allusion sur le mode alexandrin à celle qu’il

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a récusée, pour suggérer que, dans leur quête d’Achille, les Achéens ont exploré toutes les possibilités attestées par la tradition littéraire. 46. Pour cette expression, à prendre au sens propre (cf. Ripoll-Soubiran 2008, p. 223 ; contra Dilke 1954, p. 119), voir Theb., X, 605 (contexte de capnomancie comme ici). 47. Epithète d’Apollon (cf. Ov., Am., III, 389), ici au sens de « prophétique » par extension métonymique. 48. Une exception : Il. II, 858-61 ; à quoi il faut ajouter le cas particulier d’Amphiaraos. 49. Pour les références, voir Ripoll-Soubiran 2008, p. 223. 50. Ov., Met., III, 54. 51. Pour le choix de dependis (au lieu de portendis ou deprendis), voir Méheust 1971, p. 29 (et Dilke 1954, p. 119). 52. Cf. Nuzzo 2012, p. 104, qui insiste sur la valeur symbolique de ce chiffre (que l’on retrouve au v. 470) et parle de « Sept contre Troie ». 53. Cette triple conclamatio rappelle Theb., XII, 805-807 (Arcada = Parthénopée), et, en amont, Virg., Buc., VI, 53-44 et Georg., IV, 525-27. Voir à ce propos Feeney 2004, p. 87-88. 54. II, 563-64 ; IV, 365-67 ; V, 106-10 ; 239-42 ; 318-20 ; 835-37 ; VIII, 114-15 ; XXIII, 510-13. 55. Cf. Silv., I, 2, 116. 56. Cf. Il. IV, 365-400 pour Diomède. 57. Avec une clausule ovidienne ; cf. Pont., II, 1, 12 (moenibus orbem). 58. Cf. Theb., XI, 28. 59. Cf. notamment Od. XIX, 336-42. 60. Sur l’emploi du lexique érotico-élégiaque dans ce passage (ardent, amant…), voir Moul 2012, p. 293. 61. Il est vrai que Stace écrit sous les Flaviens, qui n’avaient pas les mêmes prétentions : cf. Suét., Vesp., 12 ; mais l’anecdote suétonienne atteste précisément que le modèle julio-claudien de légitimation par l’ascendance divine restait prégnant malgré la position personnelle de Vespasien. 62. Cf. Il., II, 243-77. 63. Cf. 491 : plebe. 64. Au reste, les Métamorphoses d’Ovide, considérées à juste titre comme un modèle majeur de l’ Achilléide, font aussi cohabiter des scènes pittoresques et alexandrines avec des tableaux grandioses comme le déluge ou l’équipée de Phaéton. 65. Sur la dédramatisation dans l’Achilléide, voir Ripoll-Soubiran 2008, p. 55-60 et Rosati 1992, p. 245. 66. Voir Delarue 2000, p. 210-14.

RÉSUMÉS

La section de l’Achilléide de Stace qui prend place entre le rassemblement des Grecs à Aulis et la prophétie de Calchas (467-513) est une scène de transition qui a peu retenu l’attention des commentateurs. Elle est cependant intéressante à étudier, à côté des « morceaux de bravoure » centrés sur le travestissement d’Achille, pour saisir le projet du poète dans sa globalité. Elle illustre en effet une technique du contrepoint dans cette épopée qui orchestre, sur le mode mineur et à échelle réduite, une esthétique néo-iliadique à tendance sublime en contraste avec

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l’ambiance élégiaque et alexandrine de la narration principale. Complémentairement, elle met aussi en œuvre une stratégie de dédramatisation et de decrescendo en jouant sur l’allusion à des intertextes puissamment conflictuels pour les désamorcer au profit d’une ambiance « éthique » fondée sur la modération des affects. Elle présente en outre la particularité de mobiliser des références indirectes à des modèles politiques romains pour nourrir l’évocation de la société homérique et la rapprocher de l’époque contemporaine. Une étude littéraire d’ensemble de cette scène mettra en lumière ces divers aspects.

INDEX

Mots-clés : Stace, Achilléide, Achille, Protésilas, Calchas, intertextualité, prophétie, sublime, gigantomachie, Iliade, Valérius Flaccus.

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