In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.1 (2003) 153-156 [Access article in PDF] Gesine Manuwald, ed. Der Satiriker Lucilius und seine Zeit. Zetemata 110. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001. 206 pp. Paper, fi49.90. In mid-February 2001 at the University of Freiburg, a symposium was held under the aegis of Professor Eckard Lefèvre on the theme "Lucilius, Identity, and Alterity." Moving with lightning speed, Gesine Manuwald edited fifteen of the papers given (...) there and had them ready in June so that Beck could publish them in record time. This is the swiftest production of the doings of such a symposium that I have come across. If only there had been some really new things to say about Lucilius, it would make this monograph invaluable. Unfortunately, no new fragments have appeared, and the identity of Lucilius remains shrouded in mystery for lack of new historical evidence. As for alterity, most of the participants in the project did not feel comfortable with addressing that aspect of Lucilius, probably again for lack of useful data on the satirist and his period.Nine of the fifteen papers come from the hands of students and faculty at the University of Freiburg. In addition, there are contributions from Johannes Christes of Berlin, C. J. Classen of Göttingen, Ursula Gärtner of Leipzig, Severin Kostner of Erlangen, Werner Krenkel of Rostock, and Eckart Olshausen of Stuttgart. All of the titles try to link Lucilius with a genre like epic, with a specific poet like Callimachus or Aristophanes, or with a cultural or historical phenomenon like the city of Rome or the times in which the poet lived. One essay alone addresses a specific satire, predictably the Trip to Sicily in Book 3, which provides enough surviving lines to allow a discussion of fifteen pages.Several of the essays illustrate the difficulty of putting a confident hand on the "identity" of Lucilius. Even the famous disclaimer of ambition to become a [End Page 153] publican in the new province of Asia, though firmly linked to Lucilius' name in its text, does not necessarily justify the conclusion that the poet is expressing personal pride as Manuwald claims. A pose is certainly struck, but what exactly is Lucilius proud of, and what does he propose instead? The statement could be the opening to his artistic creed as satirist, but it has other possibilities, e.g., the choice of an Epicurean existence or an attack on equestrian operators, and we need to advance every inference very tentatively. It is indeed quite possible that the lines came from a fictional dramatic situation.The first paper, by Ulrike Auhagen, deals with Lucilius and comedy, an important and difficult topic. In his early poems of the first edition, Lucilius wrote a number of scenes in comic meters. Before he completed that edition, he seems to have decided permanently against those meters, senarius and septenarius, and he confined himself to hexameters in Book 30, the last book of that edition. Did he also abandon the way he used the comic meters? That is, in his early satirical experiments, did he produce little comic vignettes on fictional situations, familiar in Plautus and Terence, or did he use comedy to make satiric commentary on the Rome of his day? If the former, which I had hoped Auhagen would consider, then we can infer the variety of the satura that the poet was exploring. If the latter, then Lucilius is already from his earliest works the hard-hitting moralist that Auhagen imagines, ready to turn any meter and any situation into an arena for his polemics. I would plead for more openness to alterity.Various papers deal with Lucilius' interest in other genres or writers. Thus, Andreas Bagordo downplays the connection with Callimachus, which Puelma Piwonka daringly argued. Bernhard Zimmermann considers Horace's apparent belief that Lucilius depended greatly on Aristophanes, and he puts it rightly into perspective. Manuwald shows how little the satirist admired the Greek and Roman tragedians, but she could have spent more time on the programmatic relevance of his disapproval: he was, after all, staking... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ovid: Dichter und WerkWilliam S. AndersonNiklas Holzberg. Ovid: Dichter und Werk. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1997. 218 pp. Cloth, DM 48, SFr 44.50, ÖS 350.Looking at the dust cover of this volume, which features a Pompeiian wall painting with an impetuous satyr tightly grasping a nude, buxom, and resistant female, a reader might be led to expect a conventionally shallow literary biography of Ovid, the poet of erotic (...) enjoyment. Probably Holzberg had nothing to do with the choice of the cover, which was designed only to attract buyers. If he did, he would have been ironically aware of the surprises he had in store for unsuspecting readers: there is little in this book to excite the average modern satyr. Instead of titillating his audience with erotic images, Holzberg focuses our attention on the elegiac system, from which, as he shows, the poet Ovid ingeniously worked.The reader receives warning in the foreword, where Holzberg says little about the historical personage Ovid but directs us instead to the variety of roles the poet Ovid developed in his different works. It is these roles that have familiarized us with Ovid, not the historical facts that have accumulated around him [End Page 651] outside his poems. Holzberg declares, then, that he wishes to read Ovid’s poetry as “novels,” that is, as fictional accounts by a fictional speaker who uses the first person.Before proceeding to the poetic works in chronological order, Holzberg devotes two important introductory chapters to discussing his approach first to the work, then to the poet. That of course reverses the order of his subtitle, but by way of correction: this writer and this book are primarily interested in the poetry that Ovid created and that we can still critically read: the poet is far more problematical. So we start with a paradox: our present time is an Ovidian Age (aetas Ovidiana), as was the era in cultivated Western Europe about a thousand years ago. We probably read Ovid today as well as, if not better than, the people who rushed to multiply Ovidian manuscripts in that previous era. However, the question is: do we read and hear Ovid with the awareness of those original Roman audiences, nearly a millennium earlier, who enjoyed what we may consider the first aetas Ovidiana, when Ovid himself was present to register his amazing effects in Rome (and to recall them fondly in exile)? The answer that Holzberg produces is: no, we don’t read Ovid as a Latin audience; instead, we pick out what makes him like us, modern. To read his works as Holzberg wants, then, we must first grasp the features which belong to the doctus poeta. Ovid was what Holzberg calls “a poet between texts” (a clever variation on Fraenkel’s famous phrase for Ovid, “a poet between two worlds”). That stresses the literary practice of intertextuality rather than the cultural interrelationships that occupied Fraenkel and his contemporaries. It also justifies the role of Holzberg, who steps in to help the helpless “modern reader” and to explain some of the key intertexts that functioned directly for Ovid’s first audiences. Similarly, a modern reader needs to step back from the trap of the plausibly witty story that Ovid’s first-person speaker narrates, to appreciate the conventions with which the poet ably plays for the amusement of his well-read audiences; and this means understanding what Holzberg calls the “elegiac system,” which serves as the basis of all Ovid’s work. Recognizing the fundamental elements of the system, we can see better how he modifies and innovates with familiar material, whether it is a form like that of the exclusus amator or the interesting variations he creates on the “slavery of love.”Holzberg’s approach to Ovid the poet is deliberately skeptical. Our only contemporary “evidence” about him is the dubious and fictional series of details and events which emerge from the mouth of the “speaker” in the poems. Holzberg distrusts even the prodigious memory of Seneca the Elder. And it is notable that Tacitus, who had the opportunity of giving Ovid an obituary around A.D. 17, in what survives of the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Roman Literary Culture: From Cicero to ApuleiusWilliam S. AndersonElaine Fantham. Roman Literary Culture: From Cicero to Apuleius. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. xv 1 326 pp. Cloth, $39.95.This is a book that needed to be written, in answer to a deep gap in our resources on Latin literature. As our current time and our students keep raising questions along the lines of cultural history, (...) we are obliged to seek answers about the circumstances that conditioned the production and consumption of [End Page 135] poetry and prose. Fantham’s book is a significant start on a project which, I dare predict, others in coming generations will be inspired to continue.Fantham modestly declares at the outset that she is contributing to the search “toward a social history of Latin literature.” If we ask her to elaborate on the extent of her project, she obliges as follows: “I see as important aspects of any literary work its author in his social and political setting, its recipients and their culture, and the medium or nature of its presentation” (2). Fleshing out each of these three aspects (author, audience, and medium of presentation), she devotes most attention to the various circumstances that affect the author. First of all, the author is almost universally male: Sulpicia is a precious exception that proves the rule. But then his social class may vary widely, as will his civil status in Rome. Fantham instances for contrast Cato and Ennius, the first a novus homo and therefore an almost fanatic advocate of Roman values, a thorough politician (consul, censor, senator), a celebrated speaker and a writer of prose (history and treatises on agriculture and education); the second a noncitizen Calabrian who came to Rome and won patronage for his poetry, then citizenship, practicing a variety of genres that looked to the Hellenistic world—a poet, not a politician. (An even greater contrast would have used Terence, a slave brought to Italy from Carthage and eventually freed because of his literary talents.) Fantham does not elaborate on how the different social and civil backgrounds affected the literary culture, except to say that senators and some equestrians did not need to resort to patronage, whereas of course outsiders and equestrians like Horace did. We would expect that social background would often have had decisive and particular influence on writers, but that is an area where we still are groping for reliable methodology. How often did men use their literary presentation to turn their backs on their socially inferior or non-Roman background? How often did they look at Roman culture obliquely from the alien cultural position of their origins?A writer’s education was obviously very important. We have a fair sense of how senatorial sons and wealthy equestrians were educated; Horace’s father, who wasn’t exactly poor, but rather undignified in the way he personally took the boy to and from school, saw to it that Horace was given an education that equaled the training of senatorial sons, both in Rome and later in Athens. Boys were taught Latin grammar, style, and the classics of Latin literature; and they were given a grounding in Greek. The amount of Greek and the relative mastery of that language would vary according to the century and the social and political intentions of the future writer. A young man whose family destined him for a political career and who one day might retire to write history, like Sallust or later Tacitus, would be unlikely to become as thoroughly bilingual and bicultural as a poet like Vergil, Horace, or Ovid, whose entire career was centered on poetry and achieving effective intertextuality with the great poets of Classical Greece and the Hellenistic world. There were men like Cato who ostentatiously [End Page 136] put Greek culture down (while instinctively exploiting it), and men like Catullus, a century later, who idolized the literary culture of Alexandria.As Fantham notes, the word “audience” (auditores) does not fully cover what we today mean by the literary public, but it was accurate to start with. Since the first literary material was tragedy and comedy, it was aimed at the... (shrink)