Читать книгу A Guide to Latin Elegy and Lyric - Barbara K. Gold - Страница 15

Let’s take the theme of politics first – although this aspect of the Roman world will inevitably shape the context in which the Latin lyric and elegiac poets engage with their puellae too. The period of time for which both lyric and elegy flourish in Rome is relatively short. Catullus is writing in the late Republican era of the 60s and 50s bce, largely under the First Triumvirate (a tense political alliance between Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey). Gallus is writing in the 40s bce, which see the assassination of Caesar and give rise to the Second Triumvirate, a power-share between Octavian (the future Augustus Caesar), Antony, and Lepidus. Horace, Tibullus, and Propertius are all active in the 30s and 20s under Octavian/Augustus’ early principate – that is, during the immediate aftermath of the bloody period of civil war and into the long period of relative peace and restoration led by Augustus. Indeed, it is tempting to see the emphasis on peace and recreation in lyric and elegy, alongside the explicit interest of these poets in making love not war, as a reaction of some kind against the horrors of the civil war period (see Harrison 2013: 133). Ovid joins the party a little later, and begins writing love elegy in the 20s, with the Augustan imperial regime now well established – although Ovid continues writing experimental elegy into the early decades of the new millennium and the reign of Augustus’ adopted son and successor, Tiberius. Latin lyric and elegy prosper for an interval of about seventy years then, but this interval corresponds with one of the most turbulent and transformative periods in ancient history as Rome makes the difficult transition from Republic to Monarchy and Empire.

These seismic changes in Rome’s political system inevitably make an impact upon the lyric and elegiac poetry being produced at the time. One of Catullus’ lesser-known elegiac couplets captures nicely the poet’s political stance (Catullus 93):

Nil nimium studeo, Caesar, tibi velle placere,

nec scire utrum sis albus an ater homo.

(I’m not especially eager in my desire to please you, Caesar,

or to know whether you are a white man or a black man.)

David Wray describes this as a poetic “performance” piece, an aggressive and uncompromising declaration of the kind of man that Catullus wishes to be (and to be seen as) – that is, the kind of man who is different in every possible way to Caesar (Wray 2001; see also Wray 2012 on this poem as a performance of Catullus’ “poetics of manhood”). In these two short lines we witness a scathing put-down of Rome’s leading figure, alongside a repudiation of the political life and a rejection of the military life that Caesar represents (and which were, at the time, the only two career options effectively open to men of status from “good” families). In his deliberate choice of vocabulary here, we see Catullus declaring that his own desires and interests lie elsewhere: Catullus doesn’t care what Caesar thinks or what he may do, Catullus doesn’t care about status and power, or sucking-up to powerful men – Catullus aims to please, to bring pleasure (placere – a term which carries erotic connotations in this elegiac context) and to answer his own desires in other ways. When Catullus says that he doesn’t know if Caesar is albus an ater homo (“a white man or a black man”) he is not expressing any particular concern with skin color or heritage; saying you don’t know whether someone is black or white means you know nothing at all about them (the equivalent of saying “who is this guy anyway?”). This is a shorthand way of saying that they are complete strangers to you. And Catullus doesn’t simply state these things, he performs them. The very act of rebuffing Caesar in this highly provocative and public fashion is itself a performance of the values that Catullus believes in. Catullus doesn’t just tell us what he thinks about Caesar, he shows us. At the same time he shows us what kind of man and what kind of poet he himself wants to be.

Horace negotiates his own self-conscious performance of both poetics and masculinity very differently and in a very different sociopolitical context. Before embarking on a career in poetry, Horace was a soldier – a military tribune serving under Brutus during the civil wars of the Second Triumvirate, fighting for the allies supporting the anti-Caesarian Republican cause, and against Octavian (the future emperor Augustus) and Antony. In the civil wars Horace fought, therefore, on the losing side at the decisive and bloody battle of Philippi. In Odes 2.7 (dedicated to his friend and companion Pompey) he writes with seeming candor about his experience of this defeat. Here he confesses to cowardice in dropping his shield on the battlefield in order to save his skin – his bravery, his manliness, his virtue, broken (fracta virtus, Odes 2.7.9–14). Yet, this “confession” too can be seen as a performance of Horace’s own “poetics of manhood”. The canonical Greek lyric poets Archilochus, Alcaeus, and possibly Anacreon too (Horace’s lyric role-models) had also written about dropping their shields on the battlefield: it is a familiar literary lyric trope. The historical “truth” of Horace’s account of his experience of Philippi is further compromised by his claim that Mercury rescued him from the enemy ranks, wrapped in a thick mist – just as epic heroes are rescued by their divine protectors in Homer’s Iliad.

This example of Horace’s poetic engagement with the turbulent politics of the period gives us a good idea of his general approach to such affairs of state. He likes to obfuscate, to hide political reality and personal opinion in a thick literary mist, so that we can never be entirely sure on which side his true political allegiances lie. This approach is clearly successful, because Horace manages to maintain a close relationship with Augustus for the rest of his long literary career (see Chapter 3). He writes under the patronage of Augustus’ political right-hand-man, Maecenas. He is commissioned to write a panegyric poem in celebration of Augustus’ ludi saeculares (literally, “the games of the century”), a long lyric piece known as the Carmen Saeculare, which was publicly performed as part of the games and in which Horace praises Augustus’ many great achievements. We find similar praise for the princeps in one of Horace’s so-called “Roman Odes” (3.6.) where he appears to speak on Augustus’ behalf in encouraging the people of Rome to mend their immoral and irreligious ways and instead to follow the examples of their ancestors (the mores maiorum). Yet it is never clear where Horace’s true political sympathies are placed. In the “Cleopatra Ode” (Odes 1.37), it is Antony who Horace figuratively wraps up in a cloud of mist and whisks away from the battlefield of civil war. The enemy in this poem is not a fellow Roman but an Egyptian queen, obfuscating the historical fact that Octavian/Augustus’ greatest victory was achieved in a civil war, fighting a Roman rather than a foreign enemy. And, although the poem ends with the word triumpho, the poem’s spotlight upon Cleopatra and her noble suicide subtly reminds us that she successfully escaped the humiliation of being paraded in chains in Caesar’s triple triumph of 29 bce. Horace, it seems, just like Mercury, is willing and able to rescue those who fight on the wrong side of Octavian/Augustus (on the complicated issue of Horace’s “Augustanism” see especially Lowrie 2007).

Tibullus is a contemporary and friend of Horace. He too sees military service and, again like Horace, he apparently displays a quiet reluctance to engage directly with the politics of the period. There is, in fact, a noticeable silence on the subject, and barely any direct reference to Augustus in any of Tibullus’ elegies. This is surprising, because Tibullus’ literary patron was a powerful politician – Messalla Corvinus, at one time an intimate ally and trusted friend of the future Augustus. Messalla seems to have retired from public life sometime after 27 bce, but before this retirement the princeps had appointed Messalla to the role of City Prefect and left him in charge of Rome while he himself was away touring the provinces. Messalla also led a successful military campaign for Octavian in Aquitania (accompanied by Tibullus) and was one of the very few Roman citizens to be granted the imperial privilege of a military “triumph” – a celebratory procession through Rome in 27 bce. These achievements by Messalla are duly recorded by Tibullus (1.7) but the closeness of the relationship between his patron and the princeps otherwise leaves barely a trace within his poetry.

Yet this is not to say that Tibullus is disengaged from the contemporary world in his writings, or that the radical political and cultural changes introduced by Augustus leave no mark at all upon his poetry. On the contrary, Tibullus’ efforts to distance himself from the new world order and its politics have a profound influence on the style and tone of his elegiac writing (see Chapter 4). In particular, Tibullus appears to be anxious about his role in this new world; his poetry repeatedly questions what it means to be a Roman citizen – and what it means to be a man. As Efi Spentzou explains (2013: 26): “There is in Tibullus’ poems a puzzling, intriguing quality: a studied air of distance from the political centre and yet a constant and deep-seated preoccupation with Roman duties, manhood and citizenship.” In this respect, Tibullus is profoundly engaged with the sociopolitical world around him and his silence about Augustus actually speaks volumes (see especially Miller 2004).

There are other aspects of the new political regime that clearly influence Tibullus’ elegiac writing. Tibullus opens and closes his first book of elegies with a forthright ideological rejection of war and imperial conquest, criticizing the desire for dominion and wealth that was driving Augustus’ imperial ambitions for Rome at this time. In direct and pointed contrast to such ambitions, Tibullus declares his own desire for peace and for a simple life in the countryside (elegies 1.1 and 1.10). He even invites his readers to see a connection between his own rejection of the status quo and the recent civil wars (just in case we happen to have missed it). He alludes to his poor “inheritance” (1.1.41–2) and the fact that his family have lost some of their ancestral property to the taxes imposed by Julius Caesar as part of the land-confiscations of 41–40 bce, which Caesar had used to dole out army pensions to those men who had been his supporters at the battle of Philippi. Tibullus does not always shy away from making political statements in his poetry, then, despite his withdrawal from the world of warfare and politics, and despite his reputation for softness and dreaminess (see Miller 2004; Spentzou 2013).

The merging of politics and poetry is far more prominent in Propertius, however. Here we see a particularly strong reaction against the bloodshed and violence of Rome’s recent history of civil war, and an anti-war rhetoric and ideology that directly opposes war (arma) to love (amor). Like Tibullus, Propertius mentions the personal loss of ancestral property to the land-confiscations of the early civil war period (4.1.128–130). More poignantly, he also mentions the personal loss of a close relative named Gallus (not the poet Gallus) at the siege of Perusia in 40 bce – one of the cruelest episodes of the civil war period (1.21 and 1.22). The long winter siege of the town of Perusia (neighboring Propertius’ own hometown, he tells us) was broken by Octavian who, in a characteristic act of violent revenge, executed the town’s leaders, slaughtered its men, and set fire to the town itself. Propertius’ kinsman managed to escape Octavian’s troops, only to be killed by bandits on the surrounding hillside, his bones left unburied, his death ultimately inglorious (see Spentzou 2013: 47–49). Propertius even dares to mention the battle of Actium (another example of Octavian’s bloody civil war victories) and to implicitly criticize the grief and heartbreak that the civil wars brought to Rome. If everyone were to follow his own example and be content to lead a quiet life full of poetry, peace, love, leisure (and plenty of wine), Propertius claims that then (2.15.43–6):

non ferrum crudele neque esset bellica navis,

nec nostra Actiacum verteret ossa mare,

nec totiens propriis circum oppugnata triumphis

lassa foret crinis solvere Roma suos.

(There would be no cruel weapons, no warships,

nor would our bones be rolled in the sea of Actium,

nor would Rome, all too often beaten down with triumphs against herself,

be so tired of tearing out/letting down her hair in grief.)

Specific references to such real historical events and to civil war atrocities in which Octavian was directly involved seem to position Propertius as unambiguously anti-Augustan. Even when Propertius is taken under the wing of a new literary patron, Maecenas (a close personal and political ally of Augustus), the poet remains reluctant to write work that is sympathetic to the princeps or his regime. In the programmatic opening poem of his second book of elegies, in an address to Maecenas, Propertius initially appears to bow to pressure to write poetry which “commemorates your Caesar’s wars and deeds” (2.1.25–6). However, as the poem continues, he offers a damning illustration of the particularly horrific wars and deeds committed by the young Augustus/Octavian (2.1.25–35):

bellaque resque tui memorarem Caesaris, et tu

Caesare sub magno cura secunda fores.

nam quotiens Mutinam aut civilia busta Philippos

aut canerem Siculae classica bella fugae,

eversosque focos antiquae gentis Etruscae,

et Ptolemaeei litora capta Phari,

aut canerem Aegyptum et Nilum, cum attractus in urbem

septem captivis debilis ibat aquis,

aut regum auratis circumdata colla catenis,

Actiaque in Sacra currere rostra Via;

te mea Musa illis semper contexeret armis,

(I would commemorate your Caesar’s wars and deeds, and you

[Maecenas] would be my next concern, second to mighty Caesar

For whenever I sang of Mutina or Philippi, where Roman citizens are buried,

or I sang of naval battles and Sicilian refugees,

or of the ruined hearths of Etruria’s ancient people,

or of the captured beaches of Ptolemaic Pharos,

and if I sang of Egypt and the Nile, when it was dragged into Rome,

flowing weakly with its seven streams captive;

or I sang of the necks of kings encircled with chains of gold,

or the prows of Actian ships sailing along the Sacred Way, then

my Muse would always weave you [Maecenas] into these wars.)

The list of Augustus’ military deeds that Propertius “commemorates” here is effectively a catalog of the many horrors the princeps committed to achieve his ultimate victory in the civil wars; the elegy sardonically “celebrates” Augustus’ brutal triumphs over his fellow Roman citizens. Propertius claims he can’t write of any of these deeds without also implicating Maecenas in the shame and guilt of such atrocities. He could compose an epic celebrating Augustus’ achievements (2.1.41–2), but as a loyal follower of Callimachus he hasn’t the “art” or the heart to write long epic verses about warfare. Nor, he claims, does he have the strength to trace Caesar’s family tree all the way back to his Trojan ancestors just to avoid having to face up to Augustus’ own decidedly unheroic history (as the poet Vergil has just done in his Aeneid). Yet the impression we get from Propertius’ poem and its recusatio (a stylized “refusal” to write on a particular topic) is not that Propertius can’t write epic but that he simply won’t write epic (or anything else) praising Augustus (see Cairns 2006; Heyworth 2007a).

Unlike his poetic predecessors, who had lived through and sometimes experienced at first hand the bloody breakdown of Rome’s democratic government and its chaotic transition from Republic to principate, Ovid entered adult life at a point of relative order and stability in Rome’s recent troubled history. Unlike Horace, who had fought against Octavian during the civil war, or Propertius, who lost his kinsman in the conflict, Ovid had no personal experience of the civil wars that had dominated life for the generation before him, and he knew no other political authority before Augustus. Also significant is the fact that Ovid seems to have written and published his poetry independently – that is, largely without the sponsorship of a literary patron. He tells us in his exile poetry that, as a young poet, he received some kind of support from Tibullus’ patron Messalla and his son Messalinus (Epistulae ex Ponto 1.7), but there is nothing in his writing to suggest the influence of a politically motivated patron at work in the background. Arguably, these two factors set Ovid apart from his lyric and elegiac predecessors and offer us insight into the comparative irreverence for all things political that is the hallmark of Ovid’s own poetry.

Other than this generally light-hearted approach to politics, Ovid’s elegiac poetry does not have very much to say about Augustus himself. No doubt inspired by the genealogical connections invented between Augustus, Aeneas, and Venus as part of the princeps’ personal re-branding (as celebrated by Vergil’s Aeneid and the many monuments and coins promoting this mythology that Augustus issued during his reign), Ovid does have some fun with the idea that Augustus is the great-grandson of the goddess of Venus. He speculates on how the history of Rome might have played out if Venus had had an abortion, meaning that Aeneas and the rest of the Julian family had never been born (Amores 2.14.17–18) – an idea that is likely to have seemed no less shocking (and politically charged) to Ovid’s contemporary Augustan audiences than it does today. Ovid also enjoys pointing out that the supposed family connection between the Julian clan and their eponymous ancestor, Aeneas’ son Iulus Ascanius, makes Cupid one of Augustus’ kinsmen. He begs the mischievously cruel god to copy the good example of his “cousin” or cognati Augustus Caesar (Amores 1.2.51) and to show the poet mercy as he parades him through the streets of Rome in a parody of a military triumph. The tone of this poem is largely playful, but there is a provocative note in the final elegiac couplet, where Ovid sarcastically reminds Cupid that Augustus is famous for showing mercy to those he has vanquished (1.2.52). As Propertius has already reminded us, in those many victories fought and won in the civil wars, the future Augustus was actually infamous for his cruelty and the lack of clemency or mercy he showed to those he had defeated. Similarly, there is also a politically informed intertextual allusion to Propertius at play in Amores 3.12.15–16, where Ovid claims that he had once briefly considered writing epic poetry about Thebes, about Troy, or about Caesar Augustus but that none of these lofty topics had sufficiently inspired his inspiration (ingenium). The one person and the one topic that ever inspired him to write poetry was a mere girl – a puella he calls “Corinna.” The insult to Augustus is casually presented here, but in the context of Augustus’ attempts in this period to reform public morals and restore “old-fashioned” codes of sexual conduct to Rome, it is deliberately provocative (see Barchiesi 1997).