PARADIGMS: PASTORAL VS BUCOLIC EPOS: ECLOGUES CYCLED INTO BOOK PROTOPLASMIC 1936: born to Kathryn Babcock & John Rowley Van Sickle, nurtured with books, reading, life with gardening, farms, & woods: my father published country weekly newspapers, my mother taught home economics, gardened, sang, played pipe organ & piano. Her mentor at the Wesley Foundation in Urbana, Elizabeth Burt, came from Radcliffe & inspired Kathryn to send my brother Paul and me to Harvard. Her brother Milton’s wife, Virginia Derrick, designed for me a prescient bookplate—a woodcut piping Pan, 1951–1954: West High School, Rockford, Illinois—Latin with Anna E.Driebusch. Editor of the school newspaper. Summer of 1953 took part in a paleontological expedition from the Nebraska State Museum at Fort Robinson, Nebraska badlands. Visited colleges in middle west, also Swarthmore, which offered a scholarship for $900. My Classics teachers there would have included Helen North & Martin Ostwald. 1954–1958: Harvard College, chose new course in close reading—Humanities Six—with Reuben Arthur Brower, then more with him. Read Horace & Catullus with Philip Levine, who advised me to pursue honors in Classics rather than the Crimson. Trained as nature counselor, Boston Museum of Science & worked for a summer near Sebago Lake, Maine. Active with Ornithological Society (Jared Diamond, Jack Hailman, John Tuborg, Stevens Heckscher.) 1956: {XX aetate mea} Lucretius with Peter Elder. In class by George Eckel Duckworth read eclogues, which he illustrated with their numerical chapels, after Paul Maury. Nequiquam quoniam. In summer worked as stringer for Rockford Morning Star, as my father had done. 1957: Spring term, audited two courses by Northrup Frye & read his new Anatomy of Criticism. That fall, as Classics club president I engineered a hopefully programmatic talk, “Textual Criticism & Literary Criticism,” by Wendell Clausen—visiting but about to be brought by Brower from Amherst, where he had graduated in 1936 summa cum laude in Classics before going on to become an interpreter of English literature a friend of Robert Frost. Senior thesis topic: Coma Berenices—comparing the still neglected Callimachus & Catullus 66— suggested by Zeph Stewart (canny, before the scholarly surge to come), but I fixed on the concept of vates, sought advice from the elusive Arthur Darby Nock: nequiquam quoniam. Erich Segal & I did Latin compositon in first class of Michael C. J. Putnam. 1958 SUMMER TO LEARN GERMAN— HORIZONS BEYOND HARVARD Paris, Rome (Ciampino), Naples & Pompei, Athens & Delphi, Florence, Munich, Vienna: dictionary for her language a graduation gift from Anne Driebusch. Confidence at learning the new language would be a touchstone when it became Italy’s turn. 1958–1959: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Greek lyric, Latin composition, & history of scholarship with Alexander Turyn, who later used to invite me to lunch each summer during his annual returns to his manuscripts in the Vatican. Fellow graduate student, Sam Abrams, poet & alumnus of Classics at Brooklyn College. 1961–1962: back from Urbana, I found Clausen ensconced—his seminar focused on Axelson’s Unpoetische Wörter in quest for textual surety. Some seminarist haughtily denied significance to mannered word patterns, Provoked, to prove him wrong, I set about marking margins in elegy & epos with manneristic stylemes—abvAB, abvBA. Assisting Eric Havelock on the Aeneid, when I remarked how dramatically he recited Infandum regina, iubes renovare dolorem, he chortled, “Plato would not have approved.” Bowdoin prize for Latin prose used to purchase from Arthur Freeman (another habitué of Gordon Cairnie’s Grolier bookshop) a Virgil (Giunta 1544) with pirated illustrations by Brandt.. 1962–1963: the concept that Virgil wrote eclogues to test the potential for epic in his own times, marshalling diverse forms into a concerted book, first came to me from a poet & Villon scholar, David Kuhn. In unbound green & yellow sheets he gave me an eclogue book—W. Antony. The Arminarm Eclogues with Hexercises for the Heclogues. Its sequence skipped [email protected] 1 of 10 John B. Van Sickle PARADIGMS: PASTORAL VS BUCOLIC EPOS: ECLOGUES CYCLED INTO BOOK from III to V, relegating the epic & vatic IIII to an appendix in mannered style. Its impact would shape my work & lead me to have it printed in Rome in 1971. Dissertation topic: Brower’s influence pointed me to pastoral (Virgil & Theocritus). That topic was taken by Charles Fantazzi, so I heard from Clausen. For a topic thus I turned to eclogue four, notoriously non-Theocritean, but singled out by omission from The Arminarm Eclogues and linked by mannered stylemes with Catullus’ epic (64) for reasons to be determined through further research: paths already explored when employed by Steele Commager to check references for his Horace. 1963–1965: Fulbright (La Sapienza, Rome), supported by Commager, who wrote to the Fulbright commission that I would easily learn Italian. Clausen told me to seek out Scevola Mariotti, who was to become a friend, but would find too radical my heritage from Brower & Frye. He soon referred me to a scholar more open to interpretive innovation. Bruno Gentili, founding editor of Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica, who published many of my articles & inspired me to edit a series. For him later I would edit Froma Zeitlin’s densely theoretical reading of the Seven Against Thebes. Gentili took to heart Havelock’s Preface to Plato & his emphasis on orality in Greek culture, also tracing oral & folk tradition in Italy.. At the library of the American Academy I plunged into research & at Libreria Eiinaudi met Joyce Lussu & began to get some taste of cultural currents in Rome. 1965: shepherded by Charlie Segal, I began teaching at Penn. That Christmas in Campidoglio I married Giulia Battaglia. 1966: {XXX a. m.} Dissertation: The Unnamed Child: a Reading of Virgil's Messianic Eclogue, abstract: Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 71 (1966) 350-351: ‘Reading’ reflects Ben Brower’s influence. In writing I came to see that this eclogue needed to be read in relation to the others, so I pressed on toward that book. The dissertation appeared only in a series edited by Gregory Nagy: A Reading of Virgil's Messianic Eclogue (New York: Garland 1992). QUERYING THE PASTORAL PARADIGM 1967: “The Unity of the Eclogues: Arcadian Forest, Theocritean Trees,” TAPA 98 (1967) 491-508 [Editor John Arthur Hanson recognized & nurtured as novel my approach.] 1968: “About Form & Feeling in Catullus 65,” TAPA 99 (1968) 487-501 [fruit of parsing all those mannered stylemes—abvBA]. 1969: “Is Theocritus a Version of Pastoral?” Modern Language Notes 84 (1969) 942-946. {As a post-doctoral fellow in Gilman hall, the Humanities C:enter, Johns Hopkins, I developed friendship with Richard Macksey, who also fostered interest in old scholarly books.] 1970: “Dialectical Methodology in the Virgilian Tradition,” Modern Language Notes 85 (1970) 884-92. [Reaching for theoretical grasp of significant opposition in the eclogues: intense discussions with Segal, who pushed on farther & faster with both Virgil & Theocritus.] “The Fourth Pastoral Poems of Virgil & Theocritus,” Atti dell’Arcadia 3.V.1 (Roma 1970) 82-97. [Venue suggested by Mariotti, a fellow of the Arcadian academy, as was another new friend from the Hopkins, Charles Singleton—in Arcadia Crisippo Dafneo.] “Poetica Teocritea,” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 9 (1970) 82-97 {toward metapoetic reading under Gentili’s aegis, offended Gregorio Serrao, then a leading Theocritean.]. PRIOR PARADIGM RECLAIMED: EPOS IN THREE KINDS—BUCOLIC//HEROIC: MIDDLE IN BETWEEN 1972: Review of Th. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus & the European Pastoral Lyric, in American Journal of Philology 93 (1972) 348-354 [As a post-doctoral fellow at the Hopkins, I was invited by Henry Rowell to review Rosenmeyer for AJP. My developing critique of ‘pastoral’ theory primed me to revile the gabinetto verde; but it reminded me, albeit in a dismissive footnote, that bucolic was classified by Quintilian among the epici— writers of epos, along with Apollonius. [email protected] 2 of 10 John B. Van Sickle PARADIGMS: PASTORAL VS BUCOLIC EPOS: ECLOGUES CYCLED INTO BOOK Epos as a genre with sub-genres—the concept confirmed Kuhn’s intuition that Virgil’s eclogues were an experiment in epic & helped to account for the dialogue with Catullus 64 & Lucretius that research had documented but not well understood in eclogue four. 1974: “Propertius (uates): Augustan Ideology, Topography, & Poetics in Elegy, IV, 1,” Dialoghi di Archaeologia 8 (1974) 116-145 [in Rome knowing Mario Torelli, Filippo Corelli & Roman topography led me again to the vates theme] 1975: “Epic & Bucolic (Theocritus, Id. vii / Virgil, Ecl. i),” QUCC 19 (1975) 45-72. [Major break through: first recognized epic program for liber bucolicon in first eclogue; talk given at American Academy in Rome, liked by Frank Brown & Henry Rowell]. 1976: {XXXX a. m.} “Theocritus & the Development of the Conception of the Bucolic Genre,” Ramus 5 (1976) 18-44. [Fruit of friendly collaboration with Luigi Enrico Rossi.] 1977:“Virgil's Sixth Eclogue & the Poetics of Middle Style,” Liverpool Classical Monthly 2 (1977) 107-08. [First theoretical clarification that Virgil pitched e6 in middle epos, which helped to account for the seemingly confused allusions to Lucretius, Catullus, Hesiod, Apollonius, Euphorion (Gallus)—pitched above bucolic epos (syracosio versu) & beneath heroic epos (reges et proelia), First of a long series