Latin Epic And Didactic Poetry

How is it possible for a poet to find his own individual voice, when he is writing in a tradition so venerable and so constrained by convention as Roman epic? How do poets working in related genres - particularly didactic - conceptualize their relationship to the main epic tradition? The eleven essays in this volume, by leading scholars in the field of Roman poetry and its post-Classical receptions, consider some of the strategies which writers from Lucretius onwards have employed in negotiating their relationship with their literary forebears, and staking out a place for their own work within a tradition stretching back to Hesiod and Homer.

This work offers a theoretical look at Latin didactic poems. It discusses the characteristics that make a poem didactic from the points of view of both theory and literary history, and traces the genre's history, from Hesiod to Roman times.

Here a team of established scholars offers new perspectives on poetic texts of wisdom, learning and teaching related to the great line of Greek and Latin poems descended from Hesiod. In previous scholarship, a drive to classify Greek and Latin didactic poetry has engaged with the near-total absence in ancient literary criticism of explicit discussion of didactic as a discrete genre. The present volume approaches didactic poetry from different perspectives: the diachronic, mapping the development of didactic through changing social and political landscapes (from Homer and Hesiod to Neo-Latin didactic); and the comparative, setting the Graeco-Roman tradition against a wider backdrop (including ancient near-eastern and contemporary African traditions). The issues raised include knowledge in its relation to power; the cognitive strategies of the didactic text; ethics and poetics; the interplay of obscurity and clarity, playfulness and solemnity; the authority of the teacher.

This work offers a theoretical look at Latin didactic poems. It discusses the characteristics that make a poem didactic from the points of view of both theory and literary history, and traces the genre's history, from Hesiod to Roman times.

Didactic Epic was enormously popular in the ancient world. It was used to teach Greeks and Romans technical and scientific subjects, but in verse. Epic Lessons shows how this scientific poetry was intended not just to instruct but also to entertain. Praise for its predecessor, Reading Epic 'Toohey's erudition makes the complexities and the strangeness of these ancient poems appear as clear as daylight and his enthusiasm renders them as attractive as the latest blockbuster.' - JACT Review

The book consists of two main parts: a) Structure and Contents, b) Catalogues in Context: In the first part the major subject is how a catalogue is organized internally. A number of structural patterns formed since Homer on the basis of the position the names held within the catalogue (density in the middle - spacing in the middle -ascending /descending mode - internal balance - erratic pattern) were to continue down to the period of Lucretius, Virgil and Ovid. Each pattern carries its own dynamism in the text and has its particular effects in the reading process. Especially when the poetic work evolves in time, the fluctuation of the density in names per verse entails a corresponding fluctuation of the narrative tempo. On occasion the reader may also recognize in the structure of the catalogue a visual parallel to the situation described. Mirroring technique -widely applied in literary and artistic works in antiquity- finds its place in the poetic catalogues of the period and can be distinguished in three major categories: the extratextual, the intertextual, and the intratextual. In Ovid the technique became most sophisticated. The second part deals with the relation of the catalogue to its surrounding text. In this respect, catalogue-markers and the way a catalogue is introduced or completed are issues which are discussed in this part of the work, as they can be indicative of the way the poet views the contents of a catalogue. What becomes evident here is that the usual catalogue-markers are the products of the notion that whoever or whatever is included in a catalogue is listed there as an individual entity, even if some of its characteristics are neutralized. This proves to be true in Virgil where the items of a catalogue retain their value whereas frame and content function in support of each other. This also occurs in the greater part of the epic tradition. Before Virgil, however, in Lucretius, the frame was often the means of subverting the traditional function of a catalogue, since it usually called into question the very existence of the beings named, or undermined their value. On some occasions, a Virgilian catalogue does not close with a verbal frame but with a pause. This mode of closure proves to be the strongest boundary between a catalogue and the continuation of the narrative. On other occasions we shall find a simile at the end of a catalogue. These closural devices stress the catalogue’s potentials as they affect the reading process. Things change in the Ovidian Metamorphoses. Ovid makes extensive use of various poetic techniques and devices which he draws from the tradition in general and Virgil in particular. In doing so, however, he often challenges their significance and forms catalogues that give the impression of delaying, by protracting the oncoming narrative. In Ovid’s work neither the pause nor the simile can easily constitute natural barriers to his catalogues. Everything in the Metamorphoses is in a continuous state of flux and the catalogue, too, has to adapt accordingly by acquiring new characteristics with novel values. This book is the first of the series Pierides, series editors: Philip Hardie - Stratis Kyriakidis

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The poetic forms, on the other hand, used by Virgil were so much more on the main line of tendency that he stands among a large number of others, some of whom might have had a high reputation but for his overwhelming superiority. Of the other essays made in this period in bucolic poetry we know too little to speak with any confidence. But both didactic poetry and the little epic were largely cultivated, and the greater epic itself was not without followers. The extant poems of the Culex and Ciris have already been noted as showing with what skill and grace unknown poets, almost if not absolutely contemporary with Virgil, could use the slighter epic forms.