Stealing the Club From Hercules : On Imitation in Latin Poetry

Gian Biagio Conte

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110475838
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this book, conceived as a sort of Prolegomena to his two Teubner editions, Conte gives account of his choices in editing his Virgilian text. Engaging in a passionate debate with his predecessors and critics, he guides the reader in a fascinating journey in the history of transmission and interpretation of Georgics and Aeneid and shows how lively textual criticism can be.

1Stealing the club from Hercules

Nihil autem crescit sola imitatione

Quint. Inst.10.2.8

Biographers often cannot resist the temptation to romanticize the facts. To enliven a tale, or to dramatize it they supply their characters with some bon mot which they actually never uttered. One of the best known among the many anecdotes contained in the ancient lives of Virgil reports a sharp reply that the poet supposedly made to his malicious detractors. Even if the anecdote should really be attributed to the imagination of the schoolmasters, it preserves the traces of a debate which would soon preoccupy Virgil’s ancient readers. When he was accused of having committed frequent furta in the Aeneid at the expense of of the Homeric poems, Virgil supposedly retorted, “it is easier to steal Jupiter’s thunderbolt or Hercules’ club than a line from Homer.”

The witticism, put in Virgil’s own mouth rather than attributed to the defenders of his poem, has all the brusqueness of a daring challenge, even an openly provocative admission. “Actually, I don’t deny that I stole. You try it, and see if you succeed!” As if he had said, “I alone was able to do this. I claim it as my own and demand your admiration.” Here is the most explicit declaration of poetic theory that we can desire. The intimate reasons for an artist’s method are lined up with proud confidence. We shall see this clearly further on.

To steal with skill should merit the same indulgence that the Spartans were said to grant; they punished not theft but the failure to conceal it.2 Virgil did not submit to being charged with an offence that he did not recognize as such; rather, he turned the matter around and claimed that he should be given credit: he wanted admiration for the exceptional artistic vigor with which he had proved that he knew how to steal the club from Hercules, that poetic power with which he had demonstrated that he could act as the patron of magisterial models so as to turn them into his personal creations.

Eliot, who probably recalled the anecdote about Virgil and his malicious critics from his schooldays, appropriated the bold reply of the greatest Latin poet and wrote with comparable brusqueness, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.”3

These are famous words, famous also for their bold and at one and the same time decisively paradoxical formulation (I sense even a touch of anti-Romantic impatience); Eliot must have felt himself personally implicated in the ancient feud over classical imitation. In fact, his pleading in defense of direct literary theft sounds like Cicero’s proverbial oratio pro domo sua. Eliot was really talking primarily about himself. He too had to answer for many lines stolen from other poets—so many that he reached the point of furnishing his poems with notes to declare his debts and borrowings openly. His detractors in their malice have insinuated that he hoped to cover with these explicit notices other thefts which had been left undeclared by himself. In just the same way, Boccaccio’s Ser Ciappelletto, a hardened offender, confessed only venial faults in order to conceal his more serious ones, and so gained sanctification. However, it is possible that Eliot, also a poet universally sanctified, was more innocent than Ser Ciappelletto; many of his reminiscences may have been unconscious and escaped his passion for confession—wreckage long since assimilated, and so well as to seem self-generated even to Eliot himself—self-generated, not imported from abroad. This is how the storehouse of memory functions, as a deposit of inert data that is still capable of returning to life on occasion.

Apparently Eliot is at odds with himself. As a practicing poet, he seems unwilling to acquire possessions without paying the bill. But when theorizing he exalts theft as a competitive gesture, an act of power and dexterity. When we reconsider, however, we understand that the two cases—that of the poet and that of the critic—affect each other mutually. There is no doubt that the art of a great poet consists in stealing with sovereign nonchalance when the opportunity arises, in appropriating to oneself another’s invention with the condescension of a patron. On the other hand, it is just as necessary for the reader to recognize what has been stolen so as to admire its skillful re-use; what was well placed there, is also well placed here. So the poet plays games with the reader lest the theft to go unobserved. Only when the shadow of the original text is recognizeable will the talent of the thieving-poet be fully appreciated by his readers.

Eliot does not hesitate to use the incriminating word “steal” to name this peremptory act of appropriation which best reveals the power of the mature poet. To lift a verse from Homer may seem to be an offence, but above all it is a feat; one should understand that to perform it is a difficult undertaking, more difficult than stealing the club from Hercules. It needs panache; it also requires courage.

In common morality, literary theft obviously met with general disapproval. It did not just reveal a lack of originality and betray a slack inspiration, but also exposed itself to the shameful accusation of plagiarism, that offence which really consisted either of usurping another man’s person or abusing his property, for example another man’s slave.4 The essential arguments can be perceived in the brusque words which Cicero, as a theorist of literature, addresses in his famous dialogue (Brutus 76) to Ennius as an imitator of Naevius: uel sumpsisti multa, si fateris, uel si negas surripuisti. Here is the narrow strait in which a man who practices imitation finds himself. Only a frank acknowledgement can succeed in eluding the accusation of theft. “We can say that you have taken a lot from Naevius, if you are inclined to admit this, or, if you deny having done so, we must conclude that you stole it from him.”5 Surripere, “covert stealing,” implies not dexterity but fraud. This alone is why it becomes the blameworthy surrogate of an act of violence; it is the weak alternative to barefaced robbery .

Similar in substance, even if better articulated, is the verdict of Seneca the rhetorician, the critic of the first imperial generation who granted to Ovid the possibility of imitating without incurring the charge of furtum (Suas.3.7). In a verse of the lost tragedy Medea, the heroine apparently said feror huc illuc, uae, plena deo “I am driven here and there, alas, possessed by the god.” This would have been a phrase invented by Virgil and retrieved by Ovid, even if one cannot read plena deo in any surviving passage of Virgil’s works. Given that the passage seems problematic, or even if we succeed in solving the question with certainty (there have been many attempts, and quite a few solutions proposed6), in the report transmitted by Seneca the Elder we are especially interested in the accompanying comment:

Thus Ovid in imitating did what he had done for many other verses of Virgil, not with the aim of stealing but with the purpose of open borrowing, even wanting the Virgilian verse to be recognized in his own text. (Itaque fecisse illum quod in multis aliis uersibus Vergili fecerat, non subripiendi causa sed palam mutuandi, hoc animo ut uellet agnosci.)

The borrowing is public (palam): Ovid relies on his readers noticing the appropriation and appreciating his craft. The recognition is intended (uellet agnosci); not only is there no theft, but the graft would lose its effect without the awareness of outsiders.

Even if they do not vary much in their criteria of judgment, ancient mediators— grammarians, rhetoricians and commentators—always showed interest in the practice of literary imitation.7 Debate over the practice arose in Greece during the fourth century BC. The most original sayings, or at any rate the least banal, can be read in what is left to us of the De Imitatione of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and in the first two chapters of Quintilian’s tenth book; but we will also find some valuable comments in the anonymous On the Sublime (13.2–4) and in the Controuersiae and Suasoriae of Seneca the Elder, not to mention the Saturnalia of Macrobius. Unfortunately the critical level attained by a large part of these works concerning the very common problem of imitation is collectively disappointing. Apart from some intermittent flights of insight, it is mostly a matter of bald judgments, too elementary and afflicted by moralizing tendencies. One can tolerate plagiarism with some distaste, but it always considered a product of inherent weakness in the imitator. In some cases Quintilian shows an above-average shrewdness and even some freedom from prejudice; on the other hand, his interest is fixed on the orator rather than the poet, and the orator’s chief prerequisite surely was not supposed to be absolute novelty of thought in language.

What discourages us in the conformist evaluations of these interpreters and critics is their incurable pedantry, especially if we compare them with the objective poetic excellence of the texts under judgment. Almost all of them, slaves to the ideology of the “first hand,” show themselves resistant to appreciating results of even great artistic value if they are reached “secondhand”—as if the over-valuation of being first-born, like a weighty handicap, necessarily robbed all artistic derivatives of their value (a preconception like the one which devalued the “dawn” poetry of the German Romantic critics, enthusiastic admirers of every primitive, undetermined, unbedingte literary product).

But even in the eyes of censors the blameworthy handicap of imitatio can find redemption. This ransom is afforded only by the zelos, or aemulatio, of competing against the model. This is the only antidote known to them against the poison of imitation. Here is a good example: Thucydides was considered in scholastic institutions the absolute master of syntomia. Seneca the Elder (Contr. 9.1.13) quotes a famous saying which was falsely believed to be the historian’s own (in reality it came from Pseudo-Demosthenes in Epist. Phil 13, but this is unimportant to us):

success is extraordinarily effective in hiding and putting in the shadow each man’s mistakes. (δειναὶ γὰρ αἱ εύπραξίαι συγκρύψαι καὶ συσκιάσαι τὰ ἑκάστων ἁμαρτήματα)

Sallust derived one of his sayings from it (Hist. 1,55,24 “success is an incredibly good screen for vices”: res secundae mire sunt uitiis obtentui). The Roman historian defied Thucydides and “struck him on his own ground”: in suis illum castris cecidit. In fact Seneca notes that Sallust is at least more concise than his model; you cannot subtract a single word from the formulation of the Latin historian (we could say that the level of redundancy is equal to zero); everything is strictly necessary. But from Thucydides’ phrasing one could eliminate at least two words: συγκρύψαι or συσκιάσαι. A contest in brevity. In short, the best defense against a possible accusation of plagiarism consists in imitation which seeks to compete with its model, or aemulatio. If the Greeks had excelled, they could only be rivaled; given that perfection itself invited a challenge, the first—obligatory—step on this path could only be imitation. But it was also important to disqualify the accusation of furtum. “Roman orators, historians, and poets did not steal many phrases from the Greeks, but instead they challenged them” (multa oratores, historici, poetae Romani a Graecis dicta non surripuerunt, sed prouocauerunt). Sometimes, however (and Seneca himself acknowledges it), the challenge ends badly for the imitators “they act like thieves who switch the handles of stolen goblets to prevent them from being recognized” (Contr. 10.5.20). Indeed aemulatio demands ability; the imitator who loses the contest falls under the merciless accusation of plagiarism.

To put it plainly, there is a disparity in attitude between critics (grammarians and commentators) on the one side, and poets on the other. The first group, because of their scholastic training, suffered from the prejudice that imitation was intrinsically a slavish act, a subordinate condition difficult to redeem—in short, a blunder for which one should feel embarrassment and remorse. Poets, on the other hand, as pupils of Mnemosyne, peacefully laid claim to the ius imitandi, and felt no sense of inferiority when gathering the utterances of other poets, whether near or far in time, renowned or obscure. They freely aspired to a shared inheritance, of which each man was at once creator and legitimate possessor. Like the anarchist Proudhon, they regarded property as nothing but theft. They did not claim this explicitly, but all their casual practice betrayed this conviction—the opposite of that held by the critics, keen-eyed searchers documenting literary traits and petty thefts.

If we want to hear the opinion of a poet, let us listen to one of the greatest— renowned not only for his intellectual originality, but also for his ability to extract meters and features from the rich mines of the two classical literatures. In the Ars Poetica Horace confronts head on the problem of artistic imitation and poetic originality. In vv. 131–5, precisely because the traditional accusation of literary theft had long since taken on the features of a charge of illegitimacy, he puts the question as a point of law:

the materials in the public domain (publica materies) will become private property (priuati iuris erit)—that means they will become your personal inheritance, if you do not stick to the circuit common and open to all, if you refuse to cling word for word to the common model like an attendant interpreter (nec uerbum uerbo curabis reddere fidus/ interpres); provided that in imitating you do not leap down into such a tight spot that shame at your incapacity or the rules of the genre prevent you from crawling out (nec desilies imitator in artum/ unde pedem proferre pudor uetet aut operis lex).

In short, the materials existing before each new literary creation—not just myths, but also topics, actions, poetic themes, stylistic procedures, verbal tricks and daring phrases—are a public heritage; they are common property and therefore very citizen is free to use them.

Having thus set aside the problem of legal property, Horace warns against a passive, inert use of the public inheritance: the materials must be reworked with personal energy and taste. He probably wants to condemn the low standards of the archaic dramatists, too submissive to Greek models to aspire to a new originality. The merit of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Content
• Foreword
• 1 Stealing the club from Hercules
• 2 A critical retrospective: method and its limits