Greek and Roman Elements in Horace\u27s Lyric Program

The vision of Horatian scholars into the nature of Horace\u27s \u27Odes\u27 has for many years been obscured by a number of disputes concerning both his use of Greek literary models, classical and Alexandrian, and his poetic judgment of his Latin predecessors and contemporaries, the neoterics and elegists. It is ironic (though the eclectic Horace might well have found it amusing) that one of the first self-proclaimed literary critics of the Western tradition has left posterity in such doubt about where precisely he himself, as poet, fits into the trends and currents of literary history

Double Meaning and Mythic Novelty in Euripides\u27 Plays

The mythic tradition of dle Greeks is protean. Each of the vast number of stories is itself variable, appearing now in one form, now in another, often standing alongside other versions which it flatly contradicts. Critical study of this remarkable tradition is doubly vexed, firSt by received myth\u27s intrinsically fluid nature, then by the fragmentary preservation of mythic source material

Every Man\u27s an Odysseus: An Analysis of the Nostos-Theme in Corelli\u27s Mandolin

In the sparkling first chapter of Louis de Bernieres\u27s Corelli\u27s Mandolin, the world of Homer\u27s Odysseus is explicitly invoked. This is hardly surprising in a historical novel which will detail the Italian occupation of the Greek island of Cephallonia, near neighbor of Odysseus\u27s Ithaca, during World War II. What is less immediately apparent is that the novel contains a further pattern of inexplicit allusion to the Odyssey, along with a pervasive theme of nostos. Emphasis on homecoming helps create the novel\u27s ardent encomium to the Greek homeland that inspires such fierce love of place in its people and promises them peace and regeneration. In an elaborate scheme of conversation between the ancient work and the modern one, three major male characters in the novel are serially cast in roles as an Odysseus and measured against that great epic hero, as their times are measured against the heroic past

Playing for His Side: Kipling’s ‘Regulus,’ Corporal Punishment, and Classical Education

Rudyard Kipling’s short story, “Regulus,” revolves around the flogging of a student who has let loose a mouse in the drawing classroom of a turn-of-the-century British public school. The first part of the story is devoted to a fifth-form Latin class’s line-by-line explication of Horace’s fifth Roman ode, in which the story’s title character is presented as a paradigm of manly virtue; the remainder is given over to narration of the mouse-miscreant’s progress toward punishment, in thematic counterpoint to the Regulus exemplum. Within that idiosyncratic framework, the story tackles as ambitious a topic as the purposes of education, with particular attention to the contemporary curricular battle between the “ancient” and “modern sides” and to the shaping of character through a combination of Latin philology, compulsory team sports, and institutionalized corporal punishment. The story holds up a mirror to an educational system crafted to initiate a colonial society’s sons into the codes of behavior designed to perpetuate its rule

‘The Metal Face of the Age’: Hesiod, Virgil, and the Iron Age on Cold Mountain

A prominent theme in Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain is that redemption from the brutality of war may be achieved by retreat from the “metal face” of the contemporary age and return to a healing agricultural work ethic. In this context, the author makes recurrent reference to the classical topic of the “Golden Age,” a lost paradise on earth. He introduces this topic first as it appeared in Hesiod’s Works and Days, expressive of a profoundly pessimistic view that human history has been one long deterioration. As his protagonist’s physical and psychic homeward journey nears completion, though, he invokes the more hopeful vision put forward in Virgil’s Georgics – that the Golden Age may return, bringing contentment in place of vain strivings and peace in place of war, at least to those who make the moral choice to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature and to toil for generative, rather than destructive, purposes

Horace, Maecenas and Odes 2.17

Few of Horace\u27s Odes have occasioned as little recent critical commentary as his poetic pledge to die along with Maecenas. Although a profitable direction for analysis was indicated by Meineke\u27s outraged condemnation of the fourth stanza and PEERLKAMP\u27S even earlier obelization of a full five of the poem\u27s eight stanzas, the road most commonly taken by critics has been to ignore this ode altogether, or to mention it in passing only. Of the most recent studies on Horace, only FRAENKEL and (necessarily) NISBET and HUBBARD\u27S exhaustive commentary on Odes II meet the poem head on. Critics\u27 difficulties with the ode have most often centered in the fourth to sixth stanzas, where the poet first defies the fire-breathing Chimaera and hundred-handed Gyas to pluck him from Maecenas\u27s side on the road to death and then adduces astrological evidence to guarantee the truthfulness of his pledge. The grandiloquence of the former and the presumed hypocrisy of the latter have subjected the poet to uneasy suspicions of a maudlin and obsequious lapse of taste

Euripides and the Decline of Character: A Soap Opera Connection

To the Greeks of the fifth century, the heroes and heroines of myth, the villains and villainesses--even the sorcerers and monsters--were figures from history, or at least historical legend. Surely the sophisticated Athenian of the fifth century did not believe in a literal interpretation of Scylla and Charybdis any more than we do, nor that Odysseus actually underwent every single setback and adventure retailed in the Odyssey. But, just as surely, he believed that there had been an Odysseus, just as implicitly as we believe in George Washington or Richard the Lion-Hearted. Unlike us, however, he also had an intimate knowledge of the characters of his myth-history. Whereas not many Americans today could tell you more than three salient facts about the lives of Paul Revere, Benjamin Franklin, or (God forbid!) Charlemagne, virtually every fifth-century Greek would be utterly familiar with most, or at least many, of the details (and variants on each detail) of the lives of Herades, Agamemnon, and hundreds of others less renowned. Their emotional ties to these heroes were strong, too--partly in the same way as people of all eras feel attached to their best-loved storybook heroes and villains; but an extra dimension is added to their attachment by the fact that, before the Sophistic revolution in thought, traditional Greek education consisted to a great extent of moral admonitions to model one\u27s life on those of the great heroes of myth, on the grounds that Virtue consists, for a boy, in being like Achilles or like Orestes (as Telemachus is told, early on, in the Odyssey) and, for a girl, in being like Penelope or unlike Clytemnestra

Horatius Callidus

When Horace turned from Sermones and Epodes to the composition of lyrics, the task that he set himself was a complex one. Like Virgil, Horace accepted wholeheartedly the poetic ideals of careful craftsmanship and sophistication advocated by Callimachus and the Alexandrians and first represented in Rome by Catullus, Calvus and Cinna. Nevertheless, the Alexandrian and neoteric programs were not enough for Horace and Virgil: both were deeply affected by the times in which they lived and were therefore determined to deal with contemporary affairs in their poetry. This determination eventually led Virgil to the impossible task of adapting the classical Greek form of epic to his own Roman world without falling into the difficulties inherent in the genre of Roman historical epic. Horace, on the other hand, had no ambitions to write on the grand scale. He chose instead a genre which would allow him the freedom to alternate between slight and elegant poems (ludi) and those of a more serious nature, whether political or philosophical. The Alexandrian forms could not offer him this freedom; nor could the exigui elegi of Gallus and his followers. Thus, he too turned to a classical form: lyric. This genre filled his needs admirably, for it was traditionally capable of enormous diversity: hymn, subjective love poetry, political, philosophical, and convivial poems all fell within its province. Furthermore, its metrical variety offered him ample opportunity to display his technical virtuosity

\u27Furor\u27 as Failed \u27Pietas\u27: Roman Poetic Constructions of Madness through the Time of Virgil

Roman poetic portrayals of mad characters through the time of Virgil construct a fundamental opposition between madness, an ipso facto self-absorbed or egoistic condition, and sanity, which duly fixes its gaze outside of itself, on parents, forebears, and the walls of state. The poets conceptualize furor less as what a modern sensibility would label insanity or mental illness than as a passion-fueled state antithetical to social order, able to be held in check only by rigorous adherence to the duty-oriented cultural code of pietas. In this moralized conception of madness, erotic furor is not a metaphorical by-path but a primary model for the hormonal and accordingly anti-rational forces that rob their victims of the outward focus demanded by the social compact