Читать книгу A Guide to Latin Elegy and Lyric - Barbara K. Gold - Страница 13

In addition to expecting their writing to be read by others, the Roman lyric poets (just like the elegists) would typically have given oral performances of their poems. It is important to note that the sort of live musical performances that Alcaeus, Sappho, and the other canonical Greek lyric poets would have known had already disappeared by this time (having died out during the Hellenistic period) but there were plenty of opportunities for the Roman poets to perform their work in person. Horace’s Carmen Saeculare would certainly have been performed before a large public audience. And it is possible that the early public readings of some of Horace’s sympotic “party poems,” in which he refers to scenes of drinking and feasting (Odes 1.4, 1.7, 1.9, 2.7, 3.8, 3.29), may originally have taken place at a dinner party (cena) or some other convivial recitatio or poetry reading event – although these poems are definitely not mere party pieces (see Chapter 3). When Tibullus calls for “More wine” (Adde merum, 1.2.1) in the opening line of his second elegy, we are similarly invited to imagine a banquet or Roman convivium as the background setting for the poem’s reading, where the wine would, indeed, have been flowing freely. Whether such convivial, sociable contexts for lyric and elegy are simply to be imagined or whether some performances actually took place in these communal settings, there is no question that Roman poets wrote their work to be read aloud – to be performed, either in private or in public (see McKeown 1987: 63–73; Gamel 1998, 2012). Ovid, for example, describes hearing his favorite poets (Tristia 4.10.41–50), and to reading his own poetry in public (Tristia 4.10.57). And Augustus’ sister Octavia famously fainted when she heard Vergil read aloud an extract from his Aeneid in which her dead son Marcellus appears as a ghost.

In this light we may recall that a core part of the education of the Roman lyric and elegiac poets involved the study of rhetoric. Ancient handbooks on the art of rhetoric typically emphasize the importance of physical performance – including gesture, posture, voice, as well as costume – to aid the oral delivery of different styles of writing and (crucially) to produce the desired emotional affect upon an audience. Indeed, such rhetorical handbooks and training would have encouraged Roman poets and their readers to treat each poem as if it were a script to be acted out. We can see this clearly in a poem such as Propertius 1.3, in which, as Mary-Kay Gamel points out, Cynthia’s complaint at being woken from her sleep by her drunken poet–lover (Gamel 2012: 352): “can be performed as a fierce attack, a whining complaint, an overly tragic pose, or a moving lament. Each of these choices, valid in itself, affects the performer’s and audience’s interpretation of the poem’s overall meaning. Cynthia’s position, in molli fixa toro cubitum (‘planting her elbow on the soft bed,’ 34), is ambiguous, and the ‘stage directions’ carefully avoid specifying how these lines are to be delivered.” As this example shows, Latin elegy (and, indeed, Latin lyric too) is not only open to very different interpretations – to different, even contradictory readings and performances – it is also a richly dramatic form of poetry which brings its characters and scenes vividly to life.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that elegy in particular should have a great deal in common with another dramatic medium: Roman New Comedy. Balancing out the genre’s traditional focus on sadness and lament, Roman elegy draws upon several of the stereotypes and stock situations familiar from the world of comedy. The Roman comic playwrights Plautus and Terence provide plenty of such material for the elegists to re-use, but the Greek comic poet Menander (on whose plots Plautus and Terence base most of their own) is also a rich resource for the elegists. In fact, as Ovid makes clear in his Amores, it is Menander who defines the key dramatis personae which populate both Latin elegy and comedy (Amores 1.15.17–18):

dum fallax servus, durus pater, improba lena

vivent et meretrix blanda, Menandros erit.

(While slaves are untrustworthy, fathers hard-hearted, bawds immoral,

and while courtesans flatter, Menander will live on.)

These stock comedic characters are certainly all found in Ovid’s Amores, together with the character role that is typically played by the elegiac poet himself – the adulescens amator or unhappy young lover. Ovid even uses this familiar character’s stock catchphrase to declare his unhappiness with life and love: “me miserum!” – “poor me/woe is me!” (Amores 1.1.25, 1.14.51, 2.5.8, 2.11.9, 3.2.69, 3.11.44). The fact that this catchphrase comes from the world of comedy reminds us not to take the poet too seriously when he says this, however. And the fact that this same phrase (and variations thereupon) already appears repeatedly throughout the canon of Latin love lyric and elegy gives us the strong impression that Ovid is well aware that whenever he says “me miserum!” he is effectively speaking to a familiar lover’s “script.” Indeed, the phrase is already well used by Catullus (50.9, 76.19, 99.11) and features prominently in the opening line of Propertius’ programmatic first elegy: Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis (“Cynthia first captured poor me with her eyes”).

The other comedy characters that Ovid lists in the Amores play similarly well-defined roles on the elegiac stage. The scheming and greedy elegiac puella is clearly based on the scheming and greedy meretrix or courtesan of New Comedy (see James 1998, 2012a). The lena (or madam) who occasionally manages her (e.g., Tibullus’ Phryne of 2.6, Propertius’ Acanthis of 4.5, and Ovid’s Dipsas of Amores 1.8) is also a familiar figure from New Comedy (see James 2003). The poet-lover’s rival (e.g., Tibullus 1.6, Propertius 2.8, Ovid Amores 1.4) – who is often portrayed as a wealthier man (vir) – is also a stock character from New Comedy. In fact, Roman elegy and Roman comedy share not only a common cast of characters and, occasionally, a common vocabulary and script; the two genres also share a common focus upon intimate, everyday scenes and domestic scenarios reflecting (albeit in stylized and fictionalized form) some of the socio-cultural realities of Augustan Rome (see Konstan 1986).