[[Read in tandem with Stephen Hinds, Allusion and Intertext. Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Alan Cameron, Chapter XVIII.1,2 “Vergil and the Augustan Recusatio,” in Callimachus and his Critics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 454-475.]]
No two readers will ever construct a set of cues in quite the same way; no one reader, even the author, will construct a set of cues in quite the same way twice. — Hinds (p. 47)
A poet prey to lovers prone to misprision is how the compiler of the new Cambridge companion represents his subject in an introductory essay on the reception accorded Virgil by readers. Sharing some of Martindale’s reproaches for business as usual among Virgilists, I look for better in his own piece on the Bucolics, only to find him captive to the very hand-me-downs he chides. Yet I refuse to believe that more than two millennia of readership must end in such a blind alley, hopeless aporia, when I find a less doctrinaire and more text sensitive theory and practice of reading in Hinds, right from his warning that “the conscientious scholar will resist the impulse to naturalize his or her own terminological choices in such a way as to preempt debate upon them.” (p. xii).
Martindale scores, I admit, when he writes that “Virgil operates for the committed Virgilian like a sacred book, endlessly repaying meditation, and part of a system of belief and cognition; it is not so much that Virgil imitates, effectively, an extra-literary world as that, for the lover of Virgil, the experience of the world, including the experience of other people, is significantly informed by his works.”
And he scores again on the poet: “an unusual and unusually evident openness to appropriation, so that the meaning of the text is configured within the value system and personal life-history of the individual reader, seems throughout the centuries to have been a particular feature of the response to Virgil.”
These Virgilian foibles represent an extreme case, we are told not without a certain hauteur, of a general subjectivity found by receptionist theorists to infect every reception of literature: ” all readings of past texts, even those claiming ‘historical accuracy’, are representable as acts of appropriation.”
Virgilists must also, with their trade journals, their societies, their mainly academic corps, not to forget their richly funded bimillennial celebrations, instance the further receptionist tenet that “canonical flourishing is always and necessarily sustained by and within institutions which enable dissemination (which include in this case publishing houses, the media, schools and universities).”
And Virgilists risk yet further reproach: “It is not clear that the history of interpretation is best figured as a history of progress; … The mistake of scholars is to suppose that the discourses within which they work are the only ones that can deliver valid ‘findings’…. The scholarly concern with source criticism — however illuminating within its own discourse — is bound up with the whole ideology and power-structure of Classics as an institution. It is perhaps no coincidence that some of the most innovative work on Virgil is now being done by scholars outside the discipline.”
The above italics are mine and they signal some preliminary suspicions. Do definite articles betray recrudescent dogmatics? Are cross-fertilization and interdisciplinarity being written off? As “innovative” two comparative studies of epic win praise, along with Theodore Ziolkoski’s Virgil and the Moderns (Princeton 1993) — a fascinating (to this Virgilist) revelation of the astonishing range of Virgil’s impact in this century. Yet such studies enlarge knowledge of how others have read without pretending to break new interpretive ground. Does receptionism exclude other kinds of innovation?
When I turn to Martindale’s “Green Politics,” I stumble first on tangled speculations about genre and the author’s self-reflexive exegesis of his “contrivedly ambiguous” title (p. 109). He reads “green” simply as recurring “11 times” in the Bucolics and grass as an “unsurprising staple ingredient.” But he does add that ” umbra and silua are more clearly used metonymically as bucolic markers.” Many another metonymic marker would emerge on rereading, to mention only a motif like “beech.”
Martindale launches his discussion proper by contrasting two critical strains, which he dubs aesthetic and political. He reproves distillations of “the pastoral” as a self-contained aesthetic form (Veyne, Snell, Alpers: pp. 109-111). Against aestheticism Martindale invokes Wolfgang Iser on the Bucolics as “a work of art that thematizes art itself,” largely free from “the traditional referential function of poetry as mimesis” (p. 111) — pronunciamentos from outside the field that for many readers will have an air of déjà lu, e.g. “It is characteristic of Virgil’s artistic method to thematize the conventions of whatever genre he is working in until he has forced these conventions to yield a figure for the subject he has chosen to treat…. Virgil’s true subject … is the dynamic of the poetic imagination: the pastoral setting becomes, in Virgil’s hands, a figure for the secluded inwardness, perilous detachment, and creative liberty of the poet’s mind.”
Martindale has company in his impatience with abstract pastoralism. For instance Alpers’ view that Virgil merely reduced to generic convention what Theocritus invented has provoked rebukes, e.g., Tracy, who argued that Virgil’s originality lay in creating a poetry book and metapoetics,
But Martindale rejects one misreading only to perpetuate another when he refers to B. VI as defining “Virgil’s whole project” (p. 111), echoing the influential creed that Virgil in B. VI adopted as the program for the entire bucolic book a Callimachean polemic against epic:
Less beguiled by scholarly misreadings of another crux in Augustan poetics, Martindale shares (although not acknowledging) the minority view that Horace classified the Bucolics as a species of epos not forte but molle atque facetum ( Serm. I.10.43-44: p. 113): read similarly by, e.g., Farrell,
When Martindale turns to B. X, however, commonplaces take over again. He rehashes the familiar signs that here Virgil seals his book and he dismisses scholars who detect genre boundaries seriously explored or bucolic failure confessed. He insists instead on the poem’s “wit and virtuosity,” leaving hard questions unasked.
Why did Virgil end his book as he did? Why open the final poem with Arethusa and why make such a point of reclaiming her from Syracuse, where she appeared in Theocritus ( Idd. 1.117, 16.102 “Sicilian Arethusa”)? Why address her as if she had yet to flee from Arcadia, imagine her exile as still in the future? To upstage Theocritus? If so, why not settle for B. V (the lament and praise for dead Daphnis) as a supplement to Id. I? Why move instead to supplant the dying Daphnis of Id. I with the vociferous Gallus of B. X? Why shift the death scene from Sicily to Arcadia? What is Virgil’s game?
Martindale pursues his attack on aestheticists by arguing plausibly for allegorical reception. Making a case for topicality both social and political (is there any difference within the pomerium or the beltway?), he twits abstractions like those of Griffin and Jenkyns. (Misapprehension of the Bucolics by the latter was already elsewhere the object of Martindale’s well aimed scorn.
Reflecting further on allegory, Martindale notes that it has long been marked by discontinuity, and cites the authority of Servius (on B. 1.1: hoc loco Tityri sub persona Vergilium debemus accipere, non tamen ubique sed tantum ubi exigit ratio. Similar discontinuity characterizes, Martindale adds, Virgil’s imitation of nature. Faulting critics who generalize the landscape as “Arcadian and idealised” (again Snell and company), Martindale sees instead “a composite of Theocritus’ Sicily and various Italian scenes and indeed Arcadia (perhaps out of Gallus’ poetry)” (pp. 119-20). Extending his critique of generalization, he dismisses “the modern critical stress on the structural unity of the collection” as undermined by “the considerable variousness of its contents” (p. 120).
Untrammeled by structural constraints, Martindale lights on B. IX, with commonplaces such as “imitates and inverts” Id. VII, Menalcas a “mask for Virgil.”
Although recognizing the “poetics of fragmentation” in B. IX (but without recalling the fundamental reading by Damon),
By way of conclusion, Martindale asserts that the discourses of aesthetics and politics each are “necessarily present within the other, at however occluded a level,” and he affirms that “we need both” (pp. 120-121). The attitude would be ecumenical if only “we” did not place itself above those others — Virgil lovers, depicted as wandering in their disparities unless corralled and branded by reception theory.
Yet if the receptionist tenet holds, that “all readings of past texts … are representable as acts of appropriation,”
Turning back to Martindale’s record as a reader, my mind fixed on his closing synthesis — “present within the other, at however occluded a level.” Would rereading, I wondered, uncover traces of others occluded in him, too?
Against aestheticism Martindale urges the hoary allegory that an old Tityrus can represent a young Virgil (or a dead Daphnis Caesar: cf. the assimilation of George Washington to Daphnis in John Parke’s Virginia, Philadelphia, 1786). But he neglects the plain fact that the other singer, Meliboeus, better represents the experience of citizens expropriated by revolutionary force, so that Virgil in two voices manages to capture two points of view, using what Perkell has called the irony that “allows the poet, the zero-voice, to be more inclusive than his speakers.”
Against what he terms “the modern critical stress on the structural unity of the collection,” Martindale urges mere “considerable variousness” with “characterisation” conceived in dramaturgical terms. thereby occluding considerable evidence that motifs and characters vary systematically in relation to their positions in the book.
The examples of significant variation are too numerous to cite here. They include “beech,”
Then there are the motifs of hours and seasons, as amplified by Spenser and Soubiran, or the trajectory from protecting shade to menacing shadows within B. I and between B. I and X, all of which variously co-ordinate with developments, openings and closings, in eclogues and in the book.
And what of “Arcadia (perhaps out of Gallus)” as Martindale described it? Where do parentheses come from? From the sort of coterie that gave us Callimachean Bucolics? Is Gallus, too, à la page ? Not certainly from attentive reading of Virgil’s Arcadian motifs in their progressively differentiated series ( B. II, IV, VI, VII, and VIII before the full locus in B. X)?
In sum, Martindale’s “considerable variousness” occludes in two ways, not only slighting variety per se but also neglecting how the variations work “metonymically as bucolic markers” to thematize the poetry in which they occur.
A final example must suffice to suggest what Martindale has written off. The first poem, when read from the viewpoint of source criticism, as Martindale calls it,
Beyond specific allusions, however, the exchange between country figures conveys metapoetic import.
Tityrus’s story of authorization takes its departure from the similar scene in Id. VII, which conveys its own metapoetic import, although Cameron treats it as a simple description of a real encounter (pp. 410-18). Two fictive characters as archly differentiated as Simichidas and Lycidas might better be construed like Tityrus and Meliboeus as figuring complementary strains in their maker’s art — one precisely, even preciously, urbane, the other outlandishly rural, so that the irony crackling in their exchange stems from the poet’s own sense of how his voices and traditions provoke each other, in the manner observed in Virgil by Perkell.
Metapoetics aside, Martindale even scants the initial reception of the Bucolics. In the figure of Tityrus’s Roman god Virgil coined a kernel of myth with dual value, both the basis for further epic development and an immediate tool in the propaganda wars. Yet Martindale glosses over the report that the Bucolics were issued with such success as to be performed frequently by actors in the theater ( Bucolica eo successu edidit ut in scena quoque per cantores pronuniarentur : Vita Donati 26-27).
Plausibly, too, this clamorous reception accounts for the reports that Virgil became a public, even mythic, figure in his own time (e.g., Tacitus, Dialogus de oratoribus 13, reporting the crowd saluting Virgil in the theater).
As a book, the Bucolics play the premier role among Augustan poetry books and they influence an entire history that includes Petrarch’s Bucolicum Carmen, Marot, Spenser, and a host of canzonieri, calendars, sequences, suites, and poem, poetry, and eclogue books:
When Martindale doubts whether “the history of interpretation is best figured as a history of progress,”
Less time passed before a contrary innovation puffed Callimachus as an aesthetic theorist and enemy of epic, promoted him over Theocritus as Virgil’s dominant source (occluding the epic ambition of B. Ι and was canonized in its turn by institutional power.
The whole spectacle makes this garden variety reader wonder at the parochialism of certain discourse and the “institutions which enable [its] dissemination.”