Charles Martindale

Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception

1. Five concepts in search of an author: suite 2. Rereading Virgil: divertimento 3. Rereading Ovid and Lucan: cadenzas 4. Translation as rereading: symphony in three movements Postscript: redeeming the text, or a lovers discourse.

The choice of Achilles : the ideology of figure in the epic

Introduction: ideology and trope in epic argument Part I. The Ancient Epic: 1. The politics of the simile in the Iliad 2. The Aeneid: the power of the figure 3. The figurative economy of the Aenid Part II. Versions of the Renaissance Epic: 4. The epistemologies of errantry in The Faerie Queene 5. The politics of allegory in The Faerie Queene 6. The compulsion of Trope: two paradigms notes Index of citations General index.

Virgils, from Dante to Milton

A medieval Companion to Virgil would not have presented him as the author of a tightly limited canon, nor would it have related his works, as modern scholars do, to the context of political life in the early principate or to their Greek sources. It would probably have reproduced exemplary stories about the poets life drawn from the biography attributed to Donatus, perhaps augmented with tales, which enjoyed widespread circulation in thirteenth-century Italy, of Virgil the magician (whose feats included ridding Naples of flies with a magic bronze statue). It might well have included discussion of the Appendix Virgiliana, the Culex, Ciris and miscellaneous epigrams, which were widely believed to be Virgilian juvenilia, and it would certainly also have contained a large quantity of allegorical commentary on Virgils works. The Fourth Eclogue was often read as a prophecy of the birth of Christ, while commentators such as Fulgentius (in the fifth century) established a reading of the first half of the Aeneid - which persisted until the sixteenth century - as an allegory of the moral progress of the soul from childish cupidity to maturity.

Virgil in art

Of all the classical authors it is Virgil whose visual legacy is the most difficult to define. With most other writers, artists were mainly concerned with illustrating their works, though the choice of subject represented and its interpretation or intended reading by the viewer may be inflected by the time and context in which it occurs. So, for example, while allegorical meanings were sometimes imparted to otherwise literally rendered episodes from writers like Homer and Ovid, or some historical event described by Plutarch or Livy could be used to express an ideal of exemplary action or to point a moral, on the whole the iconographies associated with particular authors predominantly fall into the category of illustration. Virgil is different because his influence on artists is so varied in its content and interpretation. There are, of course, a great many works of art which individually or in series draw their subjects directly from what he wrote and which very accurately reproduce his words - indeed, only Ovid has been more frequently or more exhaustively illustrated - but Virgils presence in art goes much further than the process of translating texts into images.

Gian Biagio Conte, Latin Literature: A History, trans. Joseph B. Solodow. Baltimore, MA and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. xxxiii + 827 pp:

Gian Biagio Conte, of the Department of Classical Philology at the University of Pisa, is arguably Italy’s premier Latinist. He has undertaken to combine a hostile critic might say paper over the cracks between the philological procedures traditional in the subject and more recent semiotic approaches. Like Umberto Eco he seeks grounds and limits for interpretation in an appeal to the intentio operis, the intentions of the work, a move which bypasses some of the difficulties of more familiar forms of intentionalism but at the cost of a reification of the text and an obviously idealizing conception of readers (or ’virtual readers’

Tradition and modernity

reasons why, in the sense in which these things are usually understood, such a summary could be undesirable and even impossible, a consequence of the nature of reception. Any contribution to discourse becomes an intervention in a conversation or rather many conversations which are always already taking place, and is assimilated to, appropriated for, those different conversations (cf. p. 196); even a direct quotation is already an act of (re)contextualization, of (re)interpretation. Instead I shall respond to aspects of what, from my perspective, I take to be Maclntyre’s position, in six specific areas, in the spirit of ’conversation’ as defended by Oakeshott or of dialogism, whether of a Bakhtinian or a Gadamerian type.

Prolegomena to Homer 1795

The subjects Wolf addressed have dominated Homeric scholarship for almost two centuries. Especially important were his analyses of the history of writing and of the nature of Alexandrian scholarship and his consideration of the composition of the Homeric poems--which set the terms for the analyst/unitarian controversy. His exploration of the history of the transmission of the text in antiquity opened a new field of research and transformed conceptions of the relations of ancient and modern culture.Originally published in 1986.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.