Preview
[The table of contents appears below.]
Denis Feeney first came to my attention as the author of a paper on Catullus 68[1] that everyone cited and everyone praised but that I, an ignorant and broke twenty-year-old, just couldn’t get my hands on: the shelves of my undergrad library didn’t hold Author and Audience in Latin Literature, the volume in which the paper originally appeared; copies of that volume went for over $100 online; and the existence of something like Interlibrary Loan was, back then, far off my radar. And so, by the time I finally did find a copy of Author and Audience (in 2012, in a used bookstore in Kingston, Ontario), “Shall I Compare Thee…?” had taken on a semi-mythical status. The real thing would surely disappoint.
Remarkably, though, the real thing didn’t disappoint: it seemed, in fact, to be one of the few pieces of scholarship that did justice to the startling complexity of Catullus’ poem. And perhaps even more remarkably, a decade and two graduate degrees later, that paper still seems to me as perceptive and elegant—even as beautiful—as ever. It seems, in other words, entirely worthy of its reputation, and entirely worthy, too, of being recollected in Explorations in Latin Literature, the two-volume retrospective of Feeney’s papers recently put out by Cambridge University Press.
The book under review here is the second of those two volumes.[2] Including “Shall I Compare Thee…?”, it collects 19 of Feeney’s articles, all of them previously published, most of them widely known. While the chapters of Volume I deal with “Epic, Historiography, and Religion,” the chapters of the volume at hand are advertised as focussing on “Elegy, Lyric and Other Topics.” In practice, however, one of them focuses on epic (8), another has a lot to say about religion (19), only three of them concentrate on “lyric” (4, 16, 18), and the five chapters that discuss “elegy” treat the unruly fringes of that genre (Catullus 68 [2, 11], Ovid’s Fasti, Tristia, and Ex ponto [1, 17, 19]). So, “Other Topics” is the key term of the subtitle, and this is a fairly heterogeneous group of Kleine Schriften. They treat, in full: Ovid (1, 17, 19); Catullus (2, 9, 11, 15, 16); ancient literary criticism (3, 5); Horace (4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 18); acrostics in Virgil (8); Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (12); Plautus’ Pseudolus (13); and punctuation in Latin poetry (14). The chapters are arranged in chronological order, from 1992 to 2020, and are preceded by the same Forward (by Stephen Hinds) and Introduction (by Feeney) that appear in Volume I.[3]
Part of the pleasure of reading through this disparate collection lies in the simple fact of being reminded of Feeney’s versatility as a scholar. Equal parts literary critic and cultural historian, he is as comfortable theorizing the bounds of “fictive belief” (pp. 52–63) as he is digging into the details of republican prosopography (pp. 173–81); he can defend an astute textual conjecture (pp. 367–68) just as well as he can argue for the existence of a subcategory of aetiology (pp. 368–72). As Ando remarks in his review of Volume I, “Feeney is a master of many forms.” That mastery is on full display here.
But perhaps it will be more useful if I discuss, not the volume’s variatio, but the threads that tie the whole thing together and make it a rewarding cover-to-cover read. Beyond the book’s style (always lucid, often graceful) and chronological focus (largely between the First Triumvirate and the death of Augustus), the most obvious such thread is methodological. Feeney tends to practice a type of historicizing, reader-centred literary criticism in which, crucially (to borrow one of his favourite words),[4] historical context is introduced, not to explain and certainly not to circumscribe the meaning of a text, but to “aid” and even to “guide” (cf. p. 92) our act of reading it. Here is an example of this tempered historicism at work: while the identity of L. Manlius Torquatus, Catullus’ likely addressee in poem 61, does not offer us a key to unlocking that epithalamium’s meaning, nevertheless, as Feeney shows, a reader who remembers the severe, son-slaying past of the Manlii Torquati will certainly find the concluding stanzas of poem 61 less conventional, more troubling, and altogether more interesting (pp. 184–85, 315). Moments of such careful contextualization are legion in this book (one other highlight, new to me: the phenomenon of financial credit in the Middle Republic intersects with and illuminates Plautine metatheatre [pp. 230–33]). Such moments are occasionally supplemented, too, by Feeney’s explicit reflections on, and defenses of, his brand of historicism, which is distinct, he reasonably suggests, from historicisms of both the Old and New varieties in its unwillingness to invest historical context with strong “explanatory power” (p. 8; cf. pp. 91–102, 123–25). Something that these chapters do very well, then, is collectively model a particular critical practice—a particular theory of how to “explore” Latin literature in light of, not constrained by, Roman history. It could be argued that access to that theory will have been more valuable back at the turn of the century, when the war between the historicists and anti-historicists was raging[5] and most of these papers first appeared. But the relationship between literature and history is a perennial topic in our discipline, and the coherent and powerful theory on offer in this book is still valuable today and will, I suspect, remain valuable for some time to come.
If Feeney tends to employ the same methodology throughout these 19 essays, he also tends to circle back to the same poets. There is, in effect, a libellus on Catullus here and almost an entire Horatian liber (I count around 80 pages focussed on the former poet, well over 100 on the latter). The libellus is primarily about “Catullus’ fascination with the issues of representation and mimesis” (p. 278), a fascination which Feeney tracks through poem 68 (Chapter 2), the polymetrics (Chapter 15), and poem 61 (Chapter 16). The most recently published essay in this group (and the longest essay in the volume), “Catullus 61: Epithalamium and Comparison”, hasn’t had the chance to make much of an impact on the scholarship yet, but it is particularly rich and deserves to be widely read. It constitutes, as Hinds suggests (p. xviii), “a kind of sequel” to Feeney’s earlier paper on poem 68 (Chapter 2, “Shall I Compare Thee..?”), and brings that paper’s insights on “the dissembling world of simile” (p. 50) to bear on poem 61, epithalamium as a genre, and even the nature of Greco-Roman marriage. I won’t attempt to summarize the paper’s ambitious argument in any detail, but I will say that, if the main accomplishment of “Shall I Compare Thee…?” is to help us understand what all those baffling similes are doing in poem 68, then what this newer essay chiefly achieves is a satisfying explanation of why simile is the “cardinal trope” of epithalamia—from Sappho to the Song of Solomon to Calvus. Classicists of many stripes will read it with pleasure and profit.[6]
Now onto Horace. The liber is excellent, and reminds me of something Don Fowler wrote: “All criticism is also biography, and telling a story about a text is also telling a story about oneself. This is particularly true of Horace.”[7] And it is particularly true of Denis Feeney’s Horace, who so often seems to supply or reflect the critic’s own beliefs. So, Feeney’s Horace doubts that historical contextualization can really explain a work of literature (pp. 124–25), just like Feeney (see above); Feeney’s Horace finds the fact that a literature developed at Rome at all to be bizarre (pp. 125, 134), just like Feeney (cf. Beyond Greek passim);[8] Feeney’s Horace thinks that Ennius’ Annales wasn’t really a “master-epic” (whatever that means), just like Feeney (p. 361). The poet, then, is a kind of ἄλλος ἐγώ for the critic, and many of the adjectives that you could apply to one you could apply to the other (e.g., learned, protean, bold, self-conscious). In the case of a worse scholar, such similitude would perhaps become annoying, but in the case of Feeney, one’s general impression—or rather my general impression—is this: if the “real” Horace wasn’t quite the same as Feeney’s Horace, he ought to have been.
The stories that Feeney likes to tell through his ἄλλος ἐγώ mainly concern literary history: again and again Feeney imagines what it would have been like to be Horace in Augustan Rome, contemplating—even obsessing over—his own relationship to the past six- or seven-hundred years of Greco-Roman poetry. The essays and arguments that emerge are among Feeney’s best. Chapter 4, for instance, the well-known “Horace and the Greek Lyric Poets”, really does seem to give us access to “the Greek lyricists through Horace’s eyes” (p. 85). And Chapter 7, on the Epistle to Augustus, finely captures the isolation that hung all around the poet after 19 BCE, when Virgil and Varius were dead and he was left on his own—the lone practitioner of an art “at odds with the national character” (p. 134). There is, moreover, an important argument about Horace’s formative encounter with Cicero that gets expressed most fully in Chapter 6, surfaces in Chapters 7 and 11, and finds a satisfyingly open ending in Chapter 17, “Ovid’s [Horatian] Ciceronian Literary History”.[9] Of course, none of these essays is perfect, and Feeney perhaps has the tendency to overlook or underestimate what came before his favourite authors: Laevius, for one, would be surprised to hear that Horace was “the first lyricist at Rome” (p. 344); and Accius’ Didascalica (which, incidentally, was not necessarily in prose) did more than “tak[e] up questions of authenticity and chronology” (p. 121). But those are minor complaints about a group of essays that are (as everybody already knows) excellent individually and (as I can tell you now) even better collectively.
The first page of the last chapter of this volume gestures toward scholarship that Feeney hopes to produce in the future (p. 364, n. 1). Hinds’ Forward similarly promises that Explorations in Latin Literature is merely an “interim stocktaking” of Feeney’s accomplishments—that there is much more to come. I hope that that is true. In the meantime, I will be rereading this book. You should read it too.
Table of Contents
Dedication, pp v-vi
Contents, pp vii-viii
Foreword (By Stephen Hinds), pp ix-xix
List of Acknowledgment and Original Places of Publication, pp xx-xxi
Introduction, pp 1-14
Chapter 1 – Si licet et fas est: Ovid’s Fasti and the Problem of Free Speech Under the Principate, pp 15-36
Chapter 2 – ‘Shall I Compare Thee…?’ Catullus 68B and the Limites of Analogy, pp 37-51
Chapter 3 – Towards an Account of the Ancient World’s Concepts of Fictive Belief, pp 52-63
Chapter 4 – Horace and the Greek Lyric Poets, pp 64-90
Chapter 5 – Criticism Ancient and Modern, pp 91-102
Chapter 6 – The Odiousness of Comparisons: Horace on Literary History and the Limitations of synkrisis, pp 103-112
Chapter 7 – Una cum scriptore meo: Poetry, Principate, and the Traditions of Literary History in the Epistle to Augustus, pp 113-135
Chapter 8 – Two Virgilian Acrostics: certissima signa? (with Damien Nelis), pp 136-38
Chapter 9 – Catullus and the Roman Paradox Epigram, pp 139-149
Chapter 10 – Becoming and Authority: Horace on his Own Reception, pp 150-172
Chapter 11 – Fathers and Sons: The Manlii Torquati and Family Continuity in Catullus and Horace, pp 173-191
Chapter 12 – Doing the Numbers: The Roman Mathematics of Civil War in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, pp 192-212
Chapter 13 – Crediting Pseudolus: Trust, Belief, and the Credit Crunc in Plautus’ Pseudolus, pp 213-233
Chapter 14 – Hic finis fandi: On the Absence of Punctuation for the Endings (and Beginnings) of Speeches in Latin Poetic Texts, pp 234-277
Chapter 15 – Representation and the Materiality of the Book in Catullus’ Polymetrics, pp 278-297
Chapter 16 – Catullus 61: Epithalamium and Comparison, pp 298-327
Chapter 17 – Ovid’s Ciceronian Literary History: End-Career Chronology and Autobiography, pp 328-342
Chapter 18 – Horace and the Literature of the Past: Lyric, Epic, and History in Odes 4, pp 343-363
Chapter 19 – Forma manet facti (Ov. Fast. 2.379): Aetiologies of Myth and Ritual in Ovid’s Fasti and Metamorphoses, pp 364-386
Published Works of Denis Feeney, pp 387-395
Bibliography, pp 396-430
Index Locorum, pp 431-440
General Index, pp 441-450
Notes
[1] “‘Shall I compare Thee…?’ Catullus 68B and the limits of analogy,” in Author and audience in Latin literature, edited by A. J. Woodman and J. Powell (Cambridge, 1992), 33-44.
[2] Clifford Ando has already reviewed the first in BMCR: BMCR 2022.01.22.
[3] This is awkward: the Foreword and Introduction assume a reader who will have both volumes in front of them, but the Press’ decision (?) to print these texts twice assumes the opposite.
[4] In Chapters 10-19, I count 50 appearances of “crucial(ly)” (three on p. 227 alone!).
[5] That is putting things dramatically, of course, but I have in mind, on the one side, the infamous “Cast Out Theory” stance of David West (Classical Association Presidential Address, 1995) and, on the other, the avowed “anti-historicism” of Don Fowler (Roman Constructions: Readings in Postmodern Latin [Oxford, 2000] at vii).
[6] It would have been useful if Feeney had updated his bibliography in the Catullus essays. I think the “unpublished” article by Monica Gale mentioned at p. 291, n. 65 has been published: “Aliquid putare nugas: Literary Filiation, Critical Communities and Reader-Response in Catullus,” in Latin Literature and its Transmission, edited by R. Hunter and S. P. Oakley (Cambridge, 2015), 88-107. Similarly, the “paper on Catullus 62 by Stephen Heyworth” at p. 321, n. 117 is probably: “Poems 62, 67 and other Catullian dialogues,” in What Catullus Wrote, edited by D. Kiss (Swansea, 2015), 129-56.
[7] “Lectures on Horace’s Epistles,” CCJ 54 (2008), 80-114 at 80.
[8] Beyond Greek: the beginning of Latin literature (Cambridge, MA, 2016).
[9] It is too bad that Feeney no longer plans to write a book on Cicero and the Augustan poets (pp. xi, 4, 328, n. 1). Someone needs to; Chapter 17 will form an excellent point of departure.