Greek Literature in the Roman Period and in Late Antiquity

Greek Literature

Gregory Nagy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136065941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Edited with an introduction by an internationally recognized scholar, this nine-volume set represents the most exhaustive collection of essential critical writings in the field, from studies of the classic works to the history of their reception. Bringing together the articles that have shaped modern classical studies, the set covers Greek literature in all its genres--including history, poetry, prose, oratory, and philosophy--from the 6th century BC through the Byzantine era. Since the study of Greek literature encompasses the roots of all major modern humanities disciplines, the collection also includes seminal articles exploring the Greek influence on their development. Each volume concludes with a list of recommendations for further reading. This collection is an important resource for students and scholars of comparative literature, English, history, philosophy, theater, and rhetoric as well as the classics.

23

Criticism Ancient and Modern

DENIS FEENEY

mihi de antiquis eodem modo non licebit?

Cic. Or. 171

Classicists have long taken it for granted that an acquaintance with the literary criticism of the ancients is a useful skill for the student of their literature to master.¹ This rather general and often unarticulated assumption, part of a larger professional concern with unanachronistic historical fidelity, has recently been given a much sharper focus in the work of Francis Cairns and Malcolm Heath.² The latter scholar in particular has claimed, not merely that ancient literary criticism is a useful supplement to the critical apparatus of the modern scholar, but that ancient literary criticism is in effect the only apparatus which the modern scholar may use for the purpose of ‘poetics’, an activity defined as ‘a historical enquiry into the workings of a particular system of conventions in a given historical and cultural context’.³ In the case of fifth-century Attic tragedy, for example, despite the fact that we have no contemporary critical testimony to speak of outside Aristophanes, we are assured by Heath that ‘even a fourth-century writer is a priori more likely to be a reliable guide to tragedy than the unreconstructed prejudices of the modern reader’.⁴

In order to set up the ἀγών which I wish to conduct in this essay, let me, to the accompaniment of litotes, bring on to the stage the scholar whom we honour with this volume, a man more versed than most in ancient literary criticism, and a man whom few would convict of possessing more than his share of ‘unreconstructed prejudices’. A striking leitmotif of Donald Russell’s synthetic judgements on ancient literary criticism is his apprehension that, however much ‘we cannot help reasoning that the Greeks and Romans must after all know best, since the language and the culture were their own’, nonetheless, ‘this ancient rhetorical “criticism” … is fundamentally not equal to the task of appraising classical literature’.⁵ This is true, by Russell’s account, of the ancient critics’ principles of style and allegory (6–7, 98, 131), of their study of imitatio (113), literary history (117, 168), and genre (149, 152).⁶ Both in Criticism and Antiquity and in his valedictory lecture, when he stands back to sum up his impressions of pervasive antithetical currents in ancient literature—impressions which could have been formed only by the most broad and searching reading—he concedes that they do not correspond to anything formulated by an ancient critic (indeed, to anything that could have been formulated by an ancient critic).⁷

My own rhetoric will probably have indicated which of the agonists wins my vote, and I have already elsewhere indicated that I think the ancient critics are to be used ‘as an aid, even a guide, but not as a prescription, or a straitjacket’.⁸ But I would like to develop those earlier brief remarks and justify in detail my partiality for Donald Russell’s position. Then I would like to suggest why all critics everywhere should expect to find themselves in his predicament. For the issues raised by my σύγκρισις rapidly multiply. An examination of the role of ancient criticism in the study of ancient texts soon spins into its corollary—currently very topical—of the examination of the role of modern criticism in the study of ancient texts;⁹ and that issue in turn confronts us with the problem of what we take to be the explanatory power of criticism anyway. No doubt by the end of the essay I will have taken up positions which Donald Russell would not care to occupy with me, but at least we will have begun in the same camp, and he may be sure that my own forays could not have been undertaken except under his auspices, and with the well-supplied commissariat of his scholarship.

We must begin by delineating the difficulties involved in Heath’s claim that ancient testimony is our sole legitimate interpretative key: ‘when we are dealing with the evidence of witnesses who are contemporary or near contemporaries, there is at least a presumption of general reliability; certainly, they are more likely to prove reliable guides than the untutored intuition of a modern reader—which is, in practice, the only alternative, and a patently treacherous one’.¹⁰ For all its polemical tone, such a statement captures a basic frame of mind shared by many classicists, and it takes an effort to shake oneself free of its allure.

For a start, we may observe how many ancient aesthetic objects are removed from our critical attention by the strict application of Heath’s law. He has concentrated on topics where a good deal of ancient critical evidence is extant (Attic tragedy, the problem of unity), but, even rhetorically, it is worth asking how he would propose we discuss the ancient novel, which was ‘drastically undertheorized’, as J. R. Morgan puts it, ‘even to the extent that there was no word for it in either Greek or Latin’.¹¹ If modern critics of ancient literature are to confine themselves to the critical horizon of the surviving ancient evidence, then scholars of the ancient novel might as well shut up shop. Or how are we to talk of ancient art according to Heath’s model when, for example, there is in the extant corpus of classical literature precisely one reference to vase-painting?¹²

Heath is far more alert to the difficulties of periodization than his precursor Cairns, who, in order to justify his use of a third/fourth-century AD model for interpreting literature back to the archaic period, had to make his now notorious claim that ‘in a very real sense antiquity was in comparison with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a time-free zone’.¹³ Still, despite Heath’s acknowledgement of the possible anachronism of using ancient critics who are not contemporary with their texts,¹⁴ he remains on thin ice in describing Aristotle as a near contemporary witness to Attic drama. Euripides and Sophocles had been dead for anything between forty-five and eighty-five years by the time the Poetics were composed, and Aeschylus for anything between ninety-five and one hundred and thirty-five. By this kind of calculation Pope is a near contemporary witness of Shakespeare’s aesthetic, and Tennyson a near contemporary witness of Pope’s—and this is quite apart from the problem, to which I return shortly, of what kind of witness Aristotle is.

The difficulties in historical perspective glimpsed here open up larger problems with the historicist stance represented by Heath and Cairns. One of the main flaws in this kind of approach is that it cannot do justice to the very sense of history which it purports to champion, for critics such as Heath and Cairns exhibit a systematic refusal to come to terms with the fact that their own critical practice is historically sited.¹⁵ The claim that only a given culture’s modes of criticism can work for that culture has some kind of initial plausibility, perhaps, but we have to recognize that this claim itself comes from an identifiable modern philological tradition. Heath is always denouncing modern prejudice, but the idea that we can only read ancient literature in terms of ancient criticism is itself a modern prejudice.¹⁶

And it is one which it is theoretically impossible to control in the way Heath wishes to, for any modern selection of ancient critical techniques and approaches is inherently partial, in every sense of the word. Heath asserts quite rightly that ‘we do not inspect “the poem itself” without presupposition, and our presuppositions dispose us to find plausible or implausible interpretations of one or another kind’;¹⁷ but precisely the same is true of our inspection of criticism. At the most basic level, there is simply so much ancient criticism, and it is so multifaceted, that the modern critic must pick and choose: as Andrew Ford well says of the Homeric scholia, in the course of a sympathetic but dissenting review of Heath (1989), ‘we are always taking from them what we find congenial and discarding the rest’.¹⁸ Despite acknowledging the problematic nature of the critical material,¹⁹ in his modus operandi Heath does not actually treat the corpus of ancient literary criticism as something that requires interpretation on a footing with the literature. But the corpus is itself, if you like, ‘literary’, not an inert tool. This is immediately obvious in the case of an Aristotle or a Horace, but it is also true of Servius and the largely anonymous company of the scholia. We are not dealing with a problematic body of material (‘literature’) which can be explained with the aid of a less problematic body of material (‘criticism’): we are dealing with numerous, often contesting, strands of problematic material which interact with each other in innumerable categories of time and space.²⁰

The critical terrain, in short, is riven and complex, and our modern image of it is an interpretative construct, every bit as open to anachronism and parti pris as our construction of the ‘literature’. An example of this is to be found in Heath’s use of Aristotle’s Poetics as evidence in reconstructing the ‘emotive hedonism’ which he sees as the ruling aesthetic of the tragic drama of the previous century. In using Aristotle as evidence for poetic practice in this way, he first of all removes Aristotle from a philosophical context, for, as Halliwell says, in the Poetics ‘the theory is normative, and its principles, while partly dependent on exemplification from existing works, are not simply deduced from them. The theorist’s insight claims a validity which may well contradict much of the practice of playwrights hitherto.’²¹ Further, Heath’s reading of what Aristotle has to say about the emotions is very much at odds with other recent interpretations of the Poetics, notably that of Halliwell, by whose account Aristotle’s concept of aesthetic pleasure is one ‘in which cognition and emotion are integrated’; indeed, ‘Aristotle’s conception of the emotions, pity and fear, itself rests on a cognitive basis’.²² This kind of approach to Aristotle has been behind some compelling recent studies of tragedy, especially those of Martha Nussbaum²³—though her ethics-based approach is not without its own risks, especially that of making the play, as Terry McKiernan puts it, ‘a piece of moral philosophy worn inside-out, with the example or parable on the outside and the argument that the example illustrates hidden within’.²⁴

All this has serious implications for Heath, since it is an important part of his purpose to discredit ‘intellectualizing’ readings of Attic tragedy. If Heath has to read Aristotle in a reductive way in order to make this possible, he also has to disparage another strand of ancient criticism—just as venerable and authoritative, it may seem to other observers—that is, the didactic one, as exemplified in the only genuinely contemporary substantial evidence we have, Aristophanes’ Frogs. Heath’s distinctive intellectual honesty has him acknowledge the prominence of the didactic bent in the ancient tradition, but he dismisses it as a ‘habit’, not something interesting or important, and certainly not something which gives ‘support for the intellectual interests of modern tragic interpretation’.²⁵ When an ancient critic makes a remark about a text’s emotional impact, Heath will commend him, but not when he makes a remark about its didactic impact; it is difficult to see this preference as one that emerges naturally from the material under inspection. Although I have a good deal of sympathy with many of Heath’s objections to the intellectualizing reading of Greek tragedy as it is actually practised, I do not see how he can write it down by elevating one strand of ancient criticism over another.

Heath represents a set of assumptions shared by many classicists, even if he pushes them to their extremest limit. There are doubtless many ways of accounting for the appeal of such an approach—a concern with professional rigour; a belief that only an historicizing approach is intellectually respectable; a desire to make criticism as ‘objective’ as philology, so that this movement in literary criticism in Classics becomes the counterpart of the anxieties of students of modern literatures over what exactly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Introduction
• Volume Introduction
• 1. Criticism Ancient and Modern
• 2. Longinus Revisited
• 3. Greeks, Romans, and the Rise of Atticism
• 4. The Construction of the Sixth Book of Polybius
• 5. Genre through Intertextuality: Theocritus to Virgil and Propertius
• 6. Simonides and Horace on the Death of Achilles
• 7. Sappho 31 and Catullus 51: The Dialogism of Lyric
• 8. Roman Aristotle
• 9. Cicero and Greek Philosophy
• 10. The Lyra of Orpheus
• 11. Varro and Orpheus
• 12. Greek Drama in the Roman Empire
• 13. The Concept of sôma tôn graphôn in Alexandrian Theology
• 14. Hubris in Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities 1–4
• 15. Who Read Ancient Novels?
• 16. Lollianus and the Desperadoes
• 17. AITHIOPIKA of Heliodorus: Narrative as Riddle
• 18. Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe and Roman Narrative Painting
• 19. Muthos ou Logos: Longus’s Lesbian Pastorals
• 20. Memory and Description in the Ancient Novel
• 21. The Rhetoric of a “Divine Man”: Apollonius of Tyana as Critic of Oratory and as Orator according to Philostratus
• 22. Singing Heroes: The Poetics of Hero Cult in Philostratos’s Heroikos
• 23. Hypatia’s Murder—The Sacrifice of a Virgin and Its Implications
• Copyright Acknowledgments