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 The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius
Katharina Volk

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245505.001.0001
Published: 2002 Online ISBN: 9780191714986 Print ISBN: 9780199245505

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Subject: Classical Poetry

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p. iv This book has been printed digitally and produced in a standard speci cation in order to ensure its continuing
availability

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0X2 6DP

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,

and education by publishing worldwide in

Oxford New York

Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi

Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi

New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With o ces in

Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece

Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan South Korea Poland Portugal

Singapore Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press

in the UK and in certain other countries

Published in the United States

by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

© Katharina Volk 2002

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

Reprinted 2008

All rights reserved No part of this publication maybe reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,

or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate

 reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction

outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,

Oxford University Press, at the address above

You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover

And you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

ISBN 978-0-19-924550-5

p. iv This book has been printed digitally and produced in a standard speci cation in order to ensure its continuing
availability

graphic

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0X2 6DP

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,

and education by publishing worldwide in

Oxford New York

Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi

Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi

New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With o ces in

Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece

Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan South Korea Poland Portugal

Singapore Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press

in the UK and in certain other countries

Published in the United States

by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

© Katharina Volk 2002

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

Reprinted 2008

All rights reserved No part of this publication maybe reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,

or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate

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You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover

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ISBN 978-0-19-924550-5
 The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius
Katharina Volk

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245505.001.0001
Published: 2002 Online ISBN: 9780191714986 Print ISBN: 9780199245505

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Dedication 
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Published: June 2002

Subject: Classical Poetry

p. vi
v PARENTIBVS OPTIMIS
 The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius
Katharina Volk

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245505.001.0001
Published: 2002 Online ISBN: 9780191714986 Print ISBN: 9780199245505

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Preface 
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245505.002.0005 Pages vii–viii
Published: June 2002

Subject: Classical Poetry

Many of the most famous literary works from Greek and Roman antiquity—for example, Hesiod’s Works and
Days, the poem of Lucretius, and Vergil’s Georgics—are didactic poems. Still, while these texts continue to be
read and studied, their generic status is not typically the object of scholarly investigation, and neither is the
genre of ancient didactic poetry as a whole. This may have something to do with our wariness of anything
that is or purports to be ‘didactic’; as a matter of fact, the student of this genre is not infrequently faced with
miscomprehension on the part of classicists and non-classicists alike (‘Didactic poetry? Sounds awful.’).
Nevertheless, by understanding what it is that sets a particular body of texts apart as a speci c genre, we are
able to appreciate better the qualities of the individual texts, and especially in the case of a comparatively
neglected type of literature such as didactic poetry, attention to generic characteristics can contribute in
important ways to our interpretation even of otherwise well-studied works.

In this book, I both provide a discussion of the genre of didactic poetry as a whole and examine in detail four
great Latin didactic poems, Lucretius’ De rerum natura, Vergil’s Georgics, Ovid’s Ars amatoria and Remedia
anions (which I treat as a unity), and Manilius’ Astronomica. My object is to show that there are certain
de ning characteristics of the genre and to trace the permutations of these features through the individual
texts. Special attention will be given to the ‘poetics’ of these works, that is, to what each didactic poem has
to say about its being poetry and how it presents the relationship between poetic form and didactic subject
matter, or, to quote Manilius, between carmen and res. Contrary to popular associations of didacticism with
the dry and prosaic, it will turn out that ancient didactic poetry is in fact especially self-consciously ‘poetic’.

The book is a revised and expanded version of my 1999 Princeton Ph.D. thesis and would never have been
written without the support of my adviser Elaine Fantham and the other members of my dissertation
committee, Andrew Ford, Stephen Harrison, and Robert Kaster. In addition, I am grateful to Greta Austin,
p. viii John Cooper, Richard Hunter, and René Nünlist for enlightening discussion of individual matters and to
Ryan Balot, Joseph Farrell, and the late Don Fowler for allowing me to use and cite unpublished material. My
editor at Oxford University Press, Hilary O’Shea, has been extremely helpful, as have Enid Barker, Lucy
Qureshi, and Jenny Wagsta e; I should also like to thank Rowena Anketell for her diligence in copy-editing
the manuscript and the two anonymous readers of the Press for their comments. I am grateful to Oxford
University Press for permission to cite from the Oxford Classical Texts of Lucretius (ed. Bailey, 2nd edn. 1922),
Vergil (ed. Mynors 1969), and Ovid (amatory works, ed. Kenney, 2nd edn. 1994) and to K. G. Saur Verlag for
permission to quote the Teubner text of Manilius (ed. Goold, 2nd edn. 1998). Special thanks go to my
husband Joshua, whose love and expertise have accompanied this work since its beginning. Finally, the book
is dedicated to my parents, who have taught me a lot without ever being didactic.

KV

Lewisburg, June 2001

 The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius
Katharina Volk

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245505.001.0001
Published: 2002 Online ISBN: 9780191714986 Print ISBN: 9780199245505

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Abbreviations 
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245505.002.0007 Pages xi–xii
Published: June 2002

Subject: Classical Poetry

Throughout the text and bibliography, references to classical texts typically follow the style of abbreviations
of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd edn.). A list of abbreviations for periodicals and other publications is
appended.

A&A Antike undAbendland

AAWM
Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Mainz, Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Klasse

AC
L’Antiquité classique

AGPh
Archiv r Geschichte der Philosophie

AJPh
Amencan Journal of Philology

ANRW
W. Haase and H. Temporini (eds.) (1972– ).Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt: Geschichte und
Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung. Berlin: de Gruyter

A&R
Atene e Roma

ARW
Archiv für Religionswissenschaft

ASNP
Annali della Scuola Normale Supenore di Pisa

BICS
Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies of the University of London

CB
Classical Bulletin

CGF
G. Kaibel (1899).Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. Berlin: Weidmann

CH
A. Nock and A. J. Festugière (eds.) (1946-54). Corpus Hermeticum, 4 vols. Paris: Les Belles Lettres

CJ
Classical Journal
 CPh
Classical Philology

CQ
Classical Quarterly

FPL
W. Morel, K. Büchner, and J. Blänsdorf (eds.) (1995). Fragmenta Poetarum Latinorum Epicorum et Lyricorum
(3rd edn.). Stuttgart: Teubner

GIF
Giornale italiano di lologia

Gramm. Lat.
H. Keil (ed.) (1855-80). Grammatici Latini, 8 vols. Leipzig: Teubner

GRBS
Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies

G&R
Greece & Rome

p. xii HSPh
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology

ICS
Illinois Classical Studies

LCM
Liverpool Classical Monthly

LSJ
H. G. Liddell, R. Scott, and H. S.Jones (eds.) (1996). A Greek English Lexicon With a Revised Supplement (9th
edn.). Oxford: Oxford University Press

MD
Materiali e discussioniper Vanalisi dei testi classici

MDAI(R)
Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts (Römische >Abteilung)

MH
Museum Helveticum

OLD
P. G. W. Glare (ed.) (1983).Oxford Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pauly- Wissowa
A. F. von Pauly, G. Wissowa, and W. Kroll (eds.) (1894–1980).Real-Encyclopädie der classischen
Altertumswissenschaft. Stuttgart and Munich: Metzler/Druckenmüller

PCPhS
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society

PQ
Philological Quarterly

QS
Quaderni di storia

RAL
Rendiconti delta Classe di Science morali, storiche e lologiche dell’Accademia dei Lincei

REA
Revue des études anciennes
RFIC
Rivista di lologia e di istruzione classica

RhM
Rheinisches Museum

RLAC
T. Klauser (ed.) (1950– ). Reallexikon fur Antike und Christentum: Sachwörterbuch zur Auseinandersetzung des
Christentums mit der antiken Welt. Stuttgart: Hiersemann

SICF
Studi italiani di lologia classica

SO
Symbolae Osloenses

SVF
H. F. A. von Arnim (ed.) (1903-24).Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, 4 vols. Leipzig: Teubner

TAPhA
Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association

WJA
Würzburger jahrbücher für die Altertumswissenschaft

WS
Wiener Studien

YClS
Yale Classical Studies
 The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius
Katharina Volk

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245505.001.0001
Published: 2002 Online ISBN: 9780191714986 Print ISBN: 9780199245505

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Note on Texts 
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245505.002.0008 Pages xiii–xiv
Published: June 2002

Subject: Classical Poetry

The editions used for the major works discussed in this book are as follows:

Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Cyril Bailey (Oxford Classical Text, 2nd edn. 1922). Reprinted by permission of
Oxford University Press.

Manilius, Astronomica, ed. George P. Goold (Teubner, 2nd edn. 1998), © K. G. Saur Verlag. Reprinted by
permission of K. G. Saur Verlag.

Ovid, AmoreSy Medicamina faciei femineae, Ars amatona, Remedia amoris, ed. E. J. Kenney (Oxford Classical
Text, 2nd edn. 1994), © Oxford University Press, 1961,1994. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University
Press.

Vergil, Opera, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford Classical Text, 1969), © Oxford University Press, 1969. Reprinted by
p. xiv permission of Oxford University Press.
 The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius
Katharina Volk

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245505.001.0001
Published: 2002 Online ISBN: 9780191714986 Print ISBN: 9780199245505

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Epigraph 
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Published: June 2002

Subject: Classical Poetry

p. xv bina mihi positis lucent altaria ammis, ad duo templa precor duplici circumdatus aestu carminis et rerum.

p. xvi Manilius, Astronomica 1. 20–2

 The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius
Katharina Volk

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245505.001.0001
Published: 2002 Online ISBN: 9780191714986 Print ISBN: 9780199245505

CHAPTER

Introduction 
KATHARINA VOLK

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245505.003.0001 Pages 1–5

Published: June 2002

Subject: Classical Poetry

… wie schwer es sei, ein Werk aus Wissen und Einbildungs-kraft zusammenzuweben …

Goethe, Über das Lehrgedicht

omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci.

Horace, Ars Poetica

Poetry that undertakes to lay out a branch of knowledge or teach a practical skill is likely to meet with
suspicion on the part of modern readers. After all, in our bookshops the poetry section is clearly distinct
from the one that o ers ‘how-to’ or ‘self-help’ books, and what we are looking for in the one, we de nitely
do not expect to nd in the other. Even professional classicists, who are somewhat more accustomed to
poems that treat, say, the phenomenon of volcanism or remedies against snake-bites, tend to feel uneasy
c
about what Alister Cox has described as [t]he improbable art of harnessing poetry to severely technical
instruction’ (1969: 124). Occurring at the beginning of an introduction to Greek and Latin didactic poetry,
this phrase is revealing, and what follows is even more indicative of Cox’s, and other scholars’, misgivings:
didactic poetry ‘originated almost accidentally in Greece, blossomed near-miraculously in Rome, and was
never afterwards to be convincingly revived … many would now claim that the art-form is defunct because it
is in principle impossible (resting upon the fusion of incompatible elements)’ (ibid.).

It is easy to see what is wrong with didactic poetry: to our feeling, it is a contradiction in terms. Poetry is not
meant to be instructional, and teaching is certainly not expected to be poetic. Thus, to quote Goethe, ‘[d]ie
1
didaktische oder schulmeisterliche Poesie ist und bleibt ein Mittelgeschöpf zwischen Poesie und Rhetorik.’
p. 2 It is likely that this negative view is to a great extent due to the modern, speci cally Romantic, idea that
true poetry (as opposed to an unsatisfactory hybrid like didactic poetry) is the expression of the poet’s
subjective feelings, a de nition that is not generally applicable to any ancient poetry, as classicists are well
aware. However, to worry about the status of didactic poetry is not just a modern preoccupation. As a matter
of fact, the Greeks and Romans themselves found the combination of poetry and teaching problematic, at
least from a theoretical perspective. For the most part, such poems as Hesiod’s Works and Days, Empedocles’
On Nature, and Vergil’s Georgics were not regarded as constituting a genre in their own right, but rather as
belonging to epic, with which they shared the hexameter. Aristotle, however, perceived a striking di erence
b
(Poet. 1447 13–20): unlike, for example, the Homeric poems, Empedocles’ text was not ‘mimetic’ and
therefore, according to Aristotle’s de nition, could not be called poetry at all. Later critics tried to revoke
this verdict and de ne didactic as a speci c type of poetry after all, but a general consensus was never
2
reached and didactic poetry continued to be a ‘Problem der Poetik’ long after antiquity.

In this book, I approach the same problem, but from a di erent point of view. Instead of asking, How does
didactic poetry t into a given de nition of poetry? or How can poetry and didacticism be reconciled?, I
examine a number of Latin poems commonly labelled didactic in order to see what they themselves have to
3
say about their status as poetry. My goal is to uncover the poetics of these texts, speci cally the ways in
 4
which they construct the relationship of poetic form and didactic content, of carmen and res. The reason
why I think this endeavour will be fruitful is the observation that didactic poetry—this marginalized and
supposedly ‘unpoetic’ genre—is in fact especially self-consciously ‘poetic’. Didactic poems typically
p. 3 present themselves explicitly as poetry and often show a high degree of metapoetic re ection. The rst-
person speaker or persona of these texts, who is always clearly identi ed as the poet, is usually very
prominent and almost never fails to comment on his role as the creator of the poem, often at great length.
This self-referential tendency is a characteristic of didactic poetry rarely remarked upon in scholarship and
one that I think is worth investigating.

I have chosen to focus on Lucretius’ De rerum natura, Vergil’s Georgics, Ovid’s Ars amatona and Remedia
amons, and Manilius’ Astro-nomica as representatives of didactic poetry as a whole, in particular because
these works constitute an important phase in the history of the genre. Lucretius’ De rerum natura, a
monumental work of a length unparalleled in earlier Greek and Latin didactic poetry (see Toohey 1996: 10
and 87–8), started a fashion in Latin poetry. Vergil’s Georgics reacts to the Lucretian model, while the
poems of Ovid and Manilius in turn show themselves in uenced by both Lucretius and Vergil. A comparison
of these works is thus especially rewarding for the very reason that each of them is meant to be held against
its predecessor(s). Furthermore, the fact that, with the exception of the less popular Astronomica, the chosen
poems are some of the best-known classics of Latin literature should add to the general interest of the
inquiry.

Before examining the single texts in detail (Chapters 3–6 deal respectively with Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, and
Manilius), I provide in the rst two chapters an introduction to some issues that I think are of importance
for the investigation of the poetics of didactic poetry. In Chapter 1, I discuss typical characteristics of what I
call self-conscious poems, that is, poems that present themselves explicitly as poetry. While this more
theoretical treatment will at rst appear to have little to do with my main topic, the insights gained from it
will ultimately be crucial to the interpretation of the texts. Chapter 2 will survey the theory and practice of
didactic poetry up to Lucretius and will attempt to arrive at a working de nition of the didactic genre.

One point that I wish to stress already here is that in trying to assess the role attributed to poetry within the
didactic process, I shall stay rmly on the level of the text. I shall examine what the single texts, that is,
their rst-person speakers, have to say, but I shall not draw inferences from this as to the intentions of the
p. 4 poems’ actual authors. The vexed question of whether, for example, Vergil really wanted to teach farmers
with his Georgics and how he himself viewed his role as didactic poet will not nd an answer in my work;
indeed, I remain sceptical as to whether problems of this kind can be solved in a satisfactory way. My
approach is thus rather di erent from that of E e 1977, which remains the best general treatment of
ancient didactic poetry. E e’s famous distinction of three types of didactic poetry is explicitly based on the
‘Intentionen der Autoren’: if the author has the sincere intention to teach, the poem is ‘sachbezogen’; if he
uses his topic only as a pretext for verbal virtuosity, the poem is ‘formal’; and if he pretends to teach one
thing, but really wants to get across another, the poem is ‘transparent’ (1977: 26–39). This method falls
prey both to the so-called intentional fallacy (where attitudes of a poem’s persona are attributed to the
5
author) and to impressionistic subjectivity (where the author’s ‘hidden agenda’ is ‘reconstructed’ by the
interpreter), therefore failing, in my eyes, to add to the understanding of didactic poetry as a genre.

By contrast, my focus is not on the author and his reader (extra-textual), but on the speaker or persona and
his addressee (intra-textual), and I shall strive to avoid mixing up these two separate categories, which are
6
all too often confused in literary scholarship. Thus limiting my interpretation to the world of the text, I do
not wish to suggest that I generally regard poetry as in any way autonomous or cut o from its historical
context (a point of view associated with scholarship in the tradition of New Criticism). I believe that in the
case of ancient didactic poetry, as with any other type of literature, questions regarding the social, political,
and cultural background are well worth asking (as are questions concerning the personality and intentions
of the author). However, I myself do not feel con dent to answer even the most basic questions of this kind,
let alone o er new insights on the issues involved. For example, I do not presume to exactly place Vergil’s
p. 5 Georgics within the so-called Augustan discourse (and allow myself to reserve some scepticism toward
anyone who does), but I believe that I am competent to make pronouncements on the workings of Vergil’s
persona within the poem. As a result, this book does not deal with all interesting and relevant aspects of the
didactic poems in question, just with certain ones.

As regards my use of critical terminology, my main goal in the following pages is to achieve both conceptual
and linguistic clarity. I generally employ theoretical vocabulary not according to the jargon of any particular
school, but in its ‘common’ sense, that is, in a way that I believe most literary scholars can immediately
understand. I have tried to keep my terminology simple and to use Occam’s Razor to eliminate unnecessary
distinctions and subdivisions. Thus, for example, I employ the word ‘poetry’ the way most classicists do,
that is, to refer to any λόγος ἒχων μέτρον (the de nition of Gorgias, Hel. 9), despite the fact that nouns derived
from the word noielv were used in this sense only from the fth century and that earlier Greek verbal art,
7
which was usually performed orally, is therefore perhaps more precisely described as ‘song’. Generally, I
de ne all more controversial or ambivalent terms, not always when they rst appear (this would have
necessitated a host of footnotes already in the Introduction), but when they become central to the
discussion.

Finally, as an aid to the reader, I have translated longer passages in Greek and Latin. I have tried to keep
these translations as literal as possible, no doubt with the result that they often sound pedestrian. On more
than one occasion, I have found that my translation simply cannot do justice to the complexity of the
passage in question; in these cases, I refer the reader to my discussion in the main text, where I explore at
greater length the ambivalences of a given quotation.

Notes

1 Goethe, Über das Lehrgedicht, Weimar edn. 41. 2. 225. See also the quotation, from the same essay, used as an epigraph to
the Introduction.
2 See the title of Fabian 1968. A more detailed discussion of theoretical approaches to didactic poetry in antiquity will
follow in Sect. 2.1.
3 In current literary studies, the word ʻpoeticsʼ is used in a number of di erent senses (see Brogan 1993: 929–30). Originally
referring to the ʻstudy or theory of poetryʼ, it can also be employed to mean the ʻtheory of poetry implicit in a given textʼ.
Thus, when I speak of the ʻpoeticsʼ of a certain poem, I mean ʻwhat the poem has to say about its being poetry or about
poetry in generalʼ.
4 See the quotation from Manilius used as the epigraph to the book. Note that my association of poetry with form and
didacticism with content is nothing more than a convenient shorthand in talking about the relationship of poem and
subject matter and that I do not wish to imply that my texts generally present the relationship of carmen and res in these
terms.
5 The term ʻintentional fallacyʼ was coined by Wimsatt and Beardsley in their seminal 1946 article. While I cannot follow the
authors in their radical exclusion of any consideration of historical context from the interpretation of literature, I shall
certainly strive to adhere to their principle thatʼ [w] e ought to impute the thoughts and attitudes of the poem
immediately to the dramatic speaker, and if to the author at all, only by a biographical act of inferenceʼ (1946: 470). See
also my discussion in Ch. 1, below.
6 While I may, on occasion, not resist the temptation to speculate about the relationship between author and reader, I shall
always clearly mark these forays into extra-textual territory.
7 See Ford 1992:13–18 andpassim; see also Kuhlmann 1906: 36–9 on the use of ποιητής in Greek. Note that I use ʻtextʼ
likewise anachronistically.
 The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius
Katharina Volk

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245505.001.0001
Published: 2002 Online ISBN: 9780191714986 Print ISBN: 9780199245505

CHAPTER

1 ‘Tell Me, Muse’: Characteristics of the Self-Conscious

Poem 
KATHARINA VOLK

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245505.003.0002 Pages 6–24

Published: June 2002

Abstract
All poetic texts are recognizable as poetry by means of speci c markers (e.g. verse) that are easily
identi ed by each interpretive community. This chapter shows that some poems, in addition, explicitly
present themselves as poetry, often by having their rst-person speakers or personae identify
themselves as poets and their utterances as poetry. It discusses the nature of such ‘self-conscious’
poems and traces the concept of ‘poetic self-consciousness’ through Greek and Latin literature,
pointing out, among other things, that such poems typically also exhibit ‘poetic simultaneity’; that is,
the conceit that the poem comes into being only as it evolves. The widespread metaphor of poetry as a
journey (often a naval voyage or chariot ride) is a trademark of such hyper-marked texts.

Keywords: metaphor, poetic journey, poetic self-consciousness, poetic simultaneity metaphor, poetic
journey, poetic self-consciousness, poetic simultaneity metaphor, poetic journey, poetic self-
consciousness, poetic simultaneity
Subject: Classical Poetry

Μουσάων Έλικωνιάδων ἀρχώμεθ’ ἀεíδειν.

Hesiod, Theogony

Therefore, my dear friend and companion, if you should think me somewhat sparing of my
narrative on my rst setting out,—bear with me,—and let me go on, and tell my story my own
way:—or, if I should seem now and then to tri e upon the road,—or should sometimes put on a
fool’s cap with a bell to it, for a moment or two as we pass along,—don’t y o ,— but rather
courteously give me credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon my outside;—and as we jog
on, either laugh with me, or at me, or in short, do any thing,—only keep your temper.

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

Almost everyone would intuitively agree that poetry is a kind of discourse distinct from ordinary, everyday
1
speech. However, where exactly the di erence lies is not that easy to tell, and the question of the criterion
2
by which to de ne the poetic has exercised critics since antiquity. One approach is to conceive of poetry in
purely formal terms. Thus, Gorgias declared, τὴν ποίηοιν ἄπασαν νκαὶ νομίζω καὶ ὀνομάζω λόγον ἔχοντα μέτρον (Hel. 9;
p. 7 cf. Koster 1970: 22–4·); that this connection of poetry and metre was perfectly commonplace in his time
(and, we may surmise, throughout antiquity) becomes clear from Aristotle, who complains about οἱ ἂνθρωποι.
b
… συνάπτοντες τῷ μέτρῳ τò πoιεῖv (Poet. 1447 l3–14). In the twentieth century, the view that the di erentia
speci ca of poetry can be located in formal characteristics, such as metre, formulas, or poetic language, was
rmly put forward by structuralist critics, especially the Prague School. For example, Roman Jakobson in a
 famous article de ned the poetic function of language as directedness toward the ‘message’, that is, the
3
verbal sign itself (1960: esp. 353–6), and went on to discuss linguistic criteria for poetry.

The formalist view of poetry was criticized already in antiquity. Its most prominent opponent was Aristotle,
who regarded metre as a wholly unsatisfactory criterion and, taking up a concept found already in Plato (see
a
esp. Resp. 3. 392C9–394C8), de ned poetry as μίμὴσις (Poet. 1447 13–16). As is well known, this approach,
too, has been extremely successful in the history of Western literary theory, even though modern critics
often prefer to speak of ction rather than mimesis, stressing not so much the fact that poetry imitates (Gk.
μιμεῖσθαι) reality, but rather that in doing so, it creates (Lat. ngere) its own world.

It is obvious that both theories of what makes poetry special (or, to quote Jakobson 1960: 350, ‘[w]hat makes
a verbal message a work of art’) have much that speaks in their favour. As every reader knows, poems
typically show certain formal characteristics, and they also usually exhibit the speci c relationship to the
extra-poetic reality that we call mimesis or ction. However, as critics have pointed out, the same features
can, and often do, apply to ordinary speech as well: if we do not want to label ‘poetry’ every utterance that
accidentally takes the form of a verse or relates a made-up story, we are forced to admit that ‘ordinary
language’ is not that ordinary after all, and our basis for the distinction between poetic and non-poetic
discourse collapses (see Fish 1974; Pratt 1977: 38–78).

Still, we know that there is such a thing as poetry, and that it is somehow di erent from other forms of
speech. In fact, this knowledge may turn out to be the best criterion available for a text’s status as poetry
(literature): a certain type of discourse is poetry because people regard it as poetry, and because they regard
p. 8 it as poetry, they will pay attention to certain formal characteristics or consider the story untrue. As
Stanley Fish has phrased it, literature is ‘language around which we have drawn a frame, a frame that
indicates a decision to regard with a particular self-consciousness the resources language has always
possessed’ (1974: 24). In other words, poetry is an institution, a kind of speech that a society has marked as
special, with special rules applying to its production and reception (see esp. Schmidt 1972). Obviously, this
institution can be de ned di erently at di erent times and in di erent societies; thus, ‘poetry’ may be
glossed for a certain context as ‘divinely inspired song about gods and heroes’, for another as ‘carefully
crafted piece of writing to delight an educated readership’, and so on. The reason why I think it is useful to
refer to these di erent manifestations with the same term ‘poetry’, is—apart from its convenience—the
fact that, from a historical point of view, they all stand in the same tradition: at least since the fth century
BC, people have been talking about, and producing, ‘poetry’, even though they have meant quite di erent
things by it.

This brief survey of di erent theories of poetry has brought us back to—and con rmed—the observation
4
with which I started the chapter: poetry is a kind of speech that is set apart from ordinary discourse. It is, to
quote Stanley Fish again, language with a frame drawn around it. Typically, this frame is very clearly
signalled. People recognize certain types of discourse as poetry, know the conventional markers that set this
particular kind of speech apart. When at a public festival in Classical Athens a man holding a sta recited
hexameters about the Trojan War, there was no way that the audience could have mistaken his words for,
say, an eyewitness account at a jury court or a casual story told to friends. Likewise, when we pick up a book
in the poetry section, we know that what we are going to read has a di erent status and functions according
to di erent rules from, for example, the e-mail message that we received from a colleague yesterday. Poetry
p. 9 is di erent because people regard it as di erent, and they regard it as di erent because there are certain
markers that tell them to do so. These markers may include occasion (cult festivals, poetry readings),
external form (books labelled ‘poetry’), internal form (verse, poetic language), content (traditional stories,
‘ ction’), and so on. Obviously there are always borderline cases (Jakobson 1960: 357 famously cites the
American campaign slogan ‘I like Ike’), but generally speaking, poetry is always recognized as such. Given
this fact, however, two interestingly di erent possibilities open up: a poem (identi ed by its audience or
readers as ‘poetry’, whatever it is that this means to them) can, in addition, explicitly present itself as
poetry or, otherwise, choose not to draw attention to this fact. The former kind is what I have called the
5
‘self-conscious poem’, and it is to this phenomenon that I now nally turn.

Consider, for example, the opening lines of Vergil’s Aeneid and of Propertius’ poem I. I respectively. The
phrase arma uirumque cano Troiae quipnmus ab oris not only identi es the content of the poem as ‘arms and
the man’; it also, with the help of the verb cano, clearly indicates that what we are reading is a poem and that
the rst-person speaker, who takes on the traditional role of the singing epic bard, is its poet. By contrast,
 Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis gives no such indication, and neither does anything else in the
poem; rather, the elegy styles itself as the genuine speech of the lovesick rst person.

Now, obviously no one would be deceived into believing that Propertius I. I is not in fact a poem, but actually
the real confession of an unhappy and tormented man. There are plenty of unmistakable signs that this is
poetry, including the metre, the diction, and the fact that the elegy is found in a book which contains the
works of Sextus Propertius, whom we know as a poet. As pointed out above, poetry is nearly always easily
p. 10 recognizable as such, and Propertius 1. 1 is no exception. It di ers from a work such as the Aeneid only in
6
that the latter explicitly identi es itself as poetry and its speaker as the poet, whereas the elegy does not.
And it is poems that, like the Aeneid, show themselves to be ‘aware’ of their being poetry that are the subject
of the following investigation.

Before we look more closely at some of the typical characteristics of the self-conscious poem, there is one
question that arises from the preceding discussion. To talk about a poem that is ‘self-conscious’ or to ask
what a poem ‘has to say’ is obviously a personi cation, a gure of speech convenient for any critic who, like
me, wishes to avoid speaking of authorial intention. However, what I shall really examine in the following
discussions of single texts, and what I have focused on in my short look at the two lines from Vergil and
Propertius, are the utterances of the rst-person speaker or persona. I use these two terms interchangeably
to refer to a poem’s ‘I’ (German scholarship poetically speaks of the lyrisches Ich), the ctional, intra-
textual character who is understood as speaking the entire text of the poem, unless it is clearly indicated
7
that he or she is reporting someone else’s words.

To ascribe the words of the poem’s ‘I’ not to the actual author, but to a persona, has been customary in
8
literary scholarship for a number of decades; however, it has never been uncontroversial. Whoever wishes
to identify a poem’s speaker with its author can point rst of all to the fact that to do so has been standard
9
p. 11 practice in literary scholarship since antiquity. Thus, Plato and Aristotle, for example, distinguish types
of poetry in which ‘the poet speaks’ (as in dithyramb or the narrative parts of epic) from those where he
10
introduces other speakers (as in drama or epic speeches). In addition, the rst person of a poem may even
be identi ed with the author by name. Just within my small corpus of texts, for example, the speaker of the
Georgics is called Vergilius at 4. 563, while the Ovidian magister amoris names himself Naso at Ars amatoria 2.
11
744; 3. 812; and Remedia amoris 71 -2.

The most compelling reason for the identi cation of author and persona, however, remains the fact that in a
large number of poems, namely the ones that are ‘self-conscious’, the text itself makes this equation: arma
uirumque cano unmistakably presents the speaker as the poet and thus invites the readers to understand
12
that it is Vergil himself to whom they are listening. However, readers know (and I believe that even the
most naive readers do) that this invitation is treacherous: persona, after all, means ‘mask’, and masks can
resemble the people who wear them or be completely di erent. There is no way to nd out, if not backstage;
and in the interpretation of ancient poetry, there is no backstage.

It therefore seems to me methodologically most sound to conduct my examination of poetry entirely on the
level of the persona, without trying to look behind the mask. This is in my eyes the only way to make
halfway veri able claims in the eld of literary interpretation in general; however, it is especially important
in the eld of poetics since the reconstruction of a self-conscious poem’s ‘idea of poetry’ typically relies
13
heavily on the rst-person statements of the poet/persona. Still, it should be stressed that the tendency of
many poems to imply that their speakers are their actual authors is an important aspect of their poetic
p. 12 strategies, and one of which even the most ‘anti-intentional’ critics should at least be aware, even if they
feel unable, as I do, to further investigate this relationship.

To return to poetic self-consciousness itself, it is obvious that poems can exhibit this feature to a greater or
lesser degree. After the initial invocation to the Muse, the Odyssey, for example, does not explicitly mention
its own status as divinely inspired song. The speaker of the Iliad, by contrast, returns to the Muses ve more
times (2. 484–93, 761–2; 11. 218–20; 14. 508–10; 16. 112–13) and on two occasions re ects on his own
di culties in telling the story (2. 485–6; 12.176). Compared with the poem as a whole, these passages still
do not amount to much. However, if we look at an epinician ode by Pindar or at Ovid’s Fasti, we nd that
these poems dedicate signi cant space to the persona’s talking about his poetic activity, with the result that
this appears as one of the major concerns, if not as the most important topic, of the entire poem (see,
speci cally on the Fasti, Volk 1997).
 Generally speaking, the use of poetic self-consciousness does not appear to be governed by xed rules.
Poems may or may not draw attention to their status as poetry (to do so is never necessary—a poem will
always be recognized as such anyway), and they may do so more or less prominently. Nevertheless, there do
appear to be certain tendencies, having to do with genre: some genres typically show poetic self-
consciousness, others appear to discourage it. As has become clear from the short discussion of Propertius 1.
1, there are poems that try to give themselves the semblance of spontaneous real-life utterances and thus
avoid drawing attention to their status as poetry. This is often true of shorter forms such as elegy or lyric,
types of poems that purport to express their speakers’ subjective feelings or attitudes.

By contrast, other genres stress that they are poetry, or song, because it is this very fact that gives them
their cultural importance. This is typically the case for publicly performed choral lyric: Alcman’s Partheneion
or Pindar’s victory odes (or, for that matter, Horace’s Carmen saeculare) ful l the function of being songs
sung at a certain occasion where a song is called for. Not that what the song says is unimportant, but the
most important thing is that it is a song, and it therefore highlights this fact.

Epic lies somewhere in the middle. Epic poems never fail to identify their speaker with the poet; however,
p. 13 they tend to keep their rst person in the background and emphasize the story at the expense of the
teller. This is what has been called ‘epic objectivity’, which does not, however, imply that the narrative
14
cannot be focalized, that is, coloured by various points of view, including that of the narrator himself.

As I have discussed extensively in my article on Ovid’s Fasti (Volk 1997: 288–92), a text that presents itself
explicitly as poetry and identi es its persona as the poet typically exhibits a further feature, which I have
called poetic simultaneity. By this I mean the illusion that the poem is really only coming into being as it
evolves before the readers’ eyes, that the poet/persona is composing it ‘as we watch’. Thus at the beginning
15
of a poem, its composition is usually depicted as lying in the future or just about to begin: the speaker of
the Homeric epics asks the Muse to sing, which implies that the song is starting ‘right now’; the Homeric
Hymns often open with the announcement ἂρχομ’ ἀείδειν (2. 1; 11. 1; 13. 1; 16. 1; 22. 1; 26. 1; 28. 1) or a verb in the
16
future, such as ᾄσομαι/ἀείσομαι (6. 2; 10. 1; 15. 1; 23. 1; 30 1); and Vergil’s arma uirumque cano, with a verb in
the present, implies a beginning just as much as Ovid’s tempora cum causis… | … canam (Fast. 1.1–2), with the
17
same verb in the future. At the end of a poem, the speaker may refer to the completion of his work, as the
narrator of the Metamorphoses does in 15. 871–9: there, the phrase iamque opus exegi implies that the
composition of the work is viewed as lying just about in the past; contrast the proem (1. 1–4), where to
‘speak of shapes changed into new bodies’ was only a wish of the speaker (fert animus, 1), and he asked the
gods to assist his coepta (2), ‘undertakings’, literally ‘beginnings’. Similarly, the narrator of Apollonius’
Argonautica in 4. 1773–81 bids his heroes farewell since he is arriving at the end of their toils (ἤδὴ γὰρ ἐπῖκλντὰ
πείραθ’ ἱκάνω | ὑμετέρων καμάτων, 1775–6), and he imagines the future success of his song (1773–5).

p. 14 In the course of a poem, too, the speaker may refer to the ongoing process of his composition. He can
remind us of it only occasionally, as the speaker of the Iliad does in his internal invocations to the Muses
(see above), especially at prominent moments such as the beginnings or ends of books, or in so-called
18
‘proems in the middle’ (such as Aen. 7. 37–45). However, he can also choose to keep the readers aware of
his poetic activity throughout the text. I have elsewhere tried to show this for Ovid’s Fasti, where, as I have
argued, the concentration on the speaker’s production of the poem is so strong that ‘what is usually called a
poem on the Roman calendar might as well be described as a poem about a poet writing a poem about the
Roman calendar’ (Volk 1997:291).

The Fasti may be an extreme example, but a large number of poems can be found that extensively exploit the
19
concept of poetic simultaneity. Take, for example, Horace, Odes 1. 12 (quern uirum aut heroa… ). This poem
praises a whole series of gods, demigods, and men, before culminating in the praise of Augustus, and for the
rst two-thirds of it, we are closely watching the poet/persona as he creates the song and following the
choices that he makes. He begins by asking Clio ‘which man or hero or god’ his song will celebrate (1–3);
after remaining unclear about his subject matter for the rst three stanzas, he starts treating individual
gods (13–24), demigods (25–32), and nally men (from 32), always re ecting on what he is doing. With the
help of expressions like quid prius dicam (13), neque te silebo (21), dicam (25), and Romulum post hos prius an
quietum | Pompili regnum memorem an superbos | Tarquini fascis, dubito, an Catonis | nobile letum (33–6), the
drama of the poem’s composition is unfolding before the readers’ eyes.

A speci c point that becomes apparent from Odes 1. 12 is that poetic simultaneity is not necessarily (in fact,
only rarely) used consistently throughout a poem: in the last third of the text, the speaker no longer talks
about his producing a song, but refers directly to his subject matter (the objects of his song no longer appear
 as accusatives, together with verbs of speaking in the rst person, but rather as nominatives governing their
p. 15 own verbs). It is quite common for the impression of simultaneity to lapse in the course of a poem: many
poems have self-conscious proems; far fewer have epilogues.

Also, poetic simultaneity is hardly ever a case of cut-and-dried realism. Only rarely is the speaker
convincingly presented as in the process of composing the poem for the duration of the entire text. For
instance, the notion of the text as a nished, written object may come into con ict with the illusion that the
poem is coming into existence—being sung—only right now. This is the case in the proem to Fasti 1, for
example, where the speaker presents his work, paradoxically, both as a completed book that he dedicates to
Germanicus and as a project on which he is embarking right now and for which he enlists Germanicus’
20
help.

Conversely, the notion of poetic simultaneity is so powerful that it can be used even when it is, logically
speaking, inappropriate. Thus, Horace, Odes 3. 30 (exegi monumentum aere perennius), occurring at the end
of the jointly published rst three books of Odes, gives the impression of being spoken as the end of a
uni ed, self-conscious poem characterized by poetic simultaneity, while in reality it is the last of a
collection of clearly distinct and widely varying texts, few of which show poetic self-consciousness at all.
Vergil’s Eclogues present an even more striking case. The work is characterized by a multitude of voices;
after all, half the poems are spoken by divers dramatic characters, who are often poets in their own right
and perform songs, but who are not the poets of the songs in which they themselves appear. Despite this
somewhat anarchic situation (note also that the work does not have a proem that would clarify matters),
there sometimes emerges a persona who lays claim to being, as it were, the master poet and who pretends to
have been singing what we have been listening to all along. Thus, for example, the famous opening of
Eclogues 4, Sicelides Musae, paulo maiora canamus!, shows the speaker in the middle of the process of
producing poetry, implying that the part at which we have now arrived will be somewhat ‘grander’ than
what has preceded. Note also Eclogues 10, which the persona clearly presents as the conclusion of a work
p. 16 that has supposedly been going on for some time (see esp. extremum hunc, Arethusa, mihi concede
laborem, 1 and haec sat erit, diuae, uestrum cecinisse poetam, 70).

Poetic simultaneity thus turns out to be a pervasive concept in ancient poetry. In fact, it is so common that
readers hardly notice it, and critics, too, generally fail to remark on it (though note the literature quoted in
n. 29). Often, it is no more than a topos, a literary convention without larger consequence. However, it can
also be employed to great e ect, and especially poems that are very self-conscious and have a strong
metapoetic tendency avail themselves of this feature. It is therefore worth while to enquire further into the
nature of this poetic technique and to try to understand its origin and historical development.

Looking once more at the rst line of the Aeneid, it is obvious, as mentioned above, that the poet/persona
presents himself as a singer (cano), despite the fact that Vergil certainly composed his epic in writing and
that, when the Aeneid was performed orally, it was read out or recited, not sung. The topos of the poet as
singer is, of course, perfectly familiar and persists into modern times, and as has become clear from the
preceding discussion, poetic simultaneity typically works along these same lines: the poem that is coming
into being as it evolves is conceived of as a song sung by the poet; we are hardly ever given the impression
that we are looking over the poet’s shoulder as he is writing. The mention of writing usually occurs in
reference to the already nished book and is thus not easily reconcilable with the notion of poetic
21
simultaneity.

The poet as a singer who in performing his song is creating it, composing it as he goes along—this is the
scenario implied by poetic simultaneity, and a scenario that will sound oddly familiar to many classicists,
especially Hellenists. With the same words I could have described the famous Parry-Lord theory of oral
poetry, which revolutionized Homeric studies and according to which the oral poetry from which the
Homeric poems arose was characterized by the simultaneity of composition and performance. To quote
p. 17 Lord 1960:13, ‘composition and performance are two aspects of the same moment’; therefore, an ‘oral
poem is not composed for but in performance’.

If what poetic simultaneity evokes is the composition-cum-performance of oral poetry, it is most

reasonable to assume that this very traditional feature (found already in the Iliad) in fact originally goes
back to oral poetry. In an oral performance, poetic simultaneity is not a topos, but a fact: the speaker’s
references to his ongoing singing are literally true, just as the speaker himself is not a persona, but the
actual performer/poet. Once poetry ceases to be composed in performance, however, poetic simultaneity,
22
with its traditional features, such as invocations to the Muses, turns into a mere literary convention. Thus,
 those kinds of statements that originally served to refer to the actual external performance situation come
to be used instead to create a ctive internal performance situation, a little intra-textual drama of the
23
poet/persona’s performing the song.

As classicists, we are never interpreting an oral composition-cum-performance, but always texts, whatever
exactly their origin, into whose making must have gone some of the premeditation involved in writing. I
therefore suggest that in treating poetic simultaneity (and self-referential statements in general), we
always regard it as a ction, just as it seems reasonable to me to speak always of the persona, and not of the
author. It should be noted, however, that while this principle might appear obvious to scholars dealing with
Hellenistic or Latin literature, it becomes more controversial once we turn to the criticism of Archaic Greek
poetry. After all, in this period, poetry was typically still performed (if not composed) orally, and critics
therefore have an understandable interest in the aspects of a text’s performance. Still, I would hold that it is
di cult, if not impossible, to reconstruct a poem’s performance situation on the basis of its self-referential
p. 18 statements. Even if a text was originally composed in performance, and its self-referential statements
were literally true, once it is reperformed, the self-referential statements come to refer to a ctive, internal
24
performance situation. If, as we have to assume for the majority of Archaic Greek poems, a text is
composed in advance in order to be orally performed, there are two possibilities. One option is for the poet
to devise the internal performance situation in such a way as to make it resemble as closely as possible the
supposed external performance situation. He can do so by being very general in all his references to the
singing of the song and its circumstances. Thus, in a song to be performed at a symposium, references to
the ongoing drinking and the friendship among those present will almost surely be appropriate and make
the song applicable to any similar situation (see Rösler 1983: 18–20). Conversely, the poet can try to be as
speci c as possible in his attempt to match the internal and external performance situations. This is
possible, of course, only if information about the particulars of the performance situation is available
25
beforehand. Consider the case of choral lyric, speci cally the kind where self-referential rst-person
26
statements are spoken in the voice of the chorus, such as the partheneia of Alcman and Pindar. As Mary
Lefkowitz has shown (1991: 11–25), texts of this kind abound in information about the ongoing
performance, including references to such features as dress and choreography. To make his words t the
facts, the poet must have a detailed knowledge of the projected performance, if not in fact be himself
involved in devising it.

However, the poet may instead decide not to have the internal performance situation match the external
one and thus to stress its status as ction. This, I would argue, is the case with the epinician odes of Pindar
p. 19 and Bacchylides, and it is already apparent from the fact that these songs were, as is generally believed,
27
performed not by the poet himself, but by a chorus, or otherwise a komos, while (unlike in the partheneia
discussed above) all self-referential rst-person statements refer to the poet and his composition-cum-
performance. Furthermore, the persona describes the process of creating the song in a way that is clearly
unrealistic, positively fantastic. Take a famous passage from Pindar (01. 6. 22 8), where the speaker asks to
be driven on the winner’s mule chariot through the ‘gates of hymns’ (27), along the ‘pure road’ (23), to
Pitane (28), a destination glossed as the Origin of men’ (24–5), that is, of the Iamidac. While the chariot is a
real object and Pitane a real place, the ‘gates of hymns’, ‘pure road’, and ‘Origin of men’ clearly belong to
the realm of poetry alone. It is only inside the song that the poet goes on such a fantastic chariot ride (on
this image, see more below); the real performance situation, whatever its particulars, will obviously have
been wholly di erent.

Once oral performance has lost its importance and poetry is mainly written for readers, poetic simultaneity
can no longer even attempt to refer to a real situation. Any reference to the speaker’s composition-cum-
performance is clearly recognized as ctive: everyone knows that, for example, the cano in Aeneid 1. 1 is just
a topos. Without any real connection to the actual conditions of the poem’s composition and reception,
poetic simultaneity turns into a sophisticated metapoetic technique, employed by authors who wish to
present their poems as self-conscious works of art. It may even be argued that it is in a literate culture,
where poetry is mainly read, that poetic simultaneity comes to be used most extensively. In the case of
purely oral composition-cum-performance, there is no real need to refer to the ongoing process of the
poet’s singing, even though the individual artist may choose to do so, especially at crucial moments in the
course of the performance. However, once a writer wishes to create the illusion that the poem is only coming
into being (through the agency of the poet/persona) as it is unfolding before the readers’ eyes, he or she
28
must make a much greater e ort to establish this ctive situation and keep it up throughout the book. For
p. 20 example, Apollonius’ Argonautica, a typically ‘bookish’ Hellenistic poem, not only exhibits poetic
simultaneity, but, as Robert Albis has shown, speci cally attempts to recreate the performance situation of
 Archaic Greek epic: Apollonius is striving to give the impression ‘that his studied poetry is composed
29
spontaneously and that this composition constitutes a performance’. As a result of this, however, the
Argonautica ends up a far more self-conscious poem than the Homeric epics that are its model, and it is the
speaker’s loquaciousness about his poetic activity and his very posing as an inspired bard that make it all
too clear to which period the poem really belongs. Poetic simultaneity may have its roots in the most archaic
oral poetry; however, it ourishes in the sophisticated and learned written literatures of a later age. To utter
cano smacks of the uates; but it is also a trademark of the poeta doctus.

I wish nally to have a look at some of the imagery typically associated with poetic simultaneity. The
metaphors I shall discuss are extremely archaic, but like poetic simultaneity in general, come to enjoy
special popularity in Hellenistic and Roman times, and they remain topoi throughout the Middle Ages and
beyond. Poetic simultaneity means to conceive of poetry as a process, a lengthy activity undertaken by the
poet (whom we are watching), with a clear beginning and an end. An image that suggests itself—that is, in
fact, already implicit in my use of the word ‘process’—is that of a journey: during his composition-cum-
performance, the poet travels on a certain route or along a path. ‘Path of song’ appears to be the meaning of
30
οἴμη, used three times in the Odyssey (8. 74, 481; 22. 347) to refer to ‘a speci c epic tale’; note also Hesiod,
p. 21 Works and Days 659, με … λιγυρῆς ἐπέβησαν ἀοιδῆς [sc. Μοῦσαι], and the phrase μεταβήσομαι ἂ λλον ἐς ὕμνον in the
transitional (!) formula at the end of a number of Homeric Hymns. The use of the path metaphor (not only as
an image for poetry, but also in other contexts) in Archaic and Classical Greek literature was studied
extensively by Otfried Becker in his monograph Das Bild des Weges (1937), and Marcello Durante (1958), in
particular, has demonstrated that to picture the poetic process as a journey is a concept that goes back to
Indo-European times.

The examples from Homer and Hesiod just quoted imply that the poet is travelling the path of song on foot.
However, it is more common to picture the poetic journey as either a chariot ride or a sea voyage. Both
images can be shown to be extremely old (see Durante 1958: 8–10 for Vedic parallels); they also remain
popular throughout antiquity and into modern times. Since these metaphors are familiar to classicists and
31
have been treated extensively by other scholars, there is no need for me to discuss them in detail. I wish
simply to demonstrate, with the help of two examples, how journey metaphors go together with poetic
simultaneity and by their nature tend to bolster the illusion that the creation of the poem is an ongoing
process. The rst is a famous passage in Pindar’s Pythian 4, where, in the middle of recounting the story of
Jason’s winning the Golden Fleece, the speaker interrupts himself with the words,

μακρά μοι νεῖσθαι κατ’ ἀμαξιτόν ὥρα γàρ συνάπτει- καί τινα οἶμον ἲσαμαι βραχύν

(247–8)

(It is far for me to travel on the road, for time is pressing, and I know some short path.)

While on his poetic journey, the poet suddenly decides to change his route and take a short cut: he
p. 22 summarizes the remaining story of Jason and Medea only very brie y (this is the οἶμος βραχύς) in order to
move on quickly to his new topic. All this goes on in plain view, as it were, of the audience or reader: a true
instance of poetic simultaneity.

My second example involves the ship metaphor and comes from a text wholly di erent from the Pindaric
ode just cited. At the end of the rst book of Ovid’s Ars amatoria, the speaker signals a break:

pars superat coepti, pars est exhausta laboris; hic teneat nostras ancora iacta rates.

(1. 771–2)

(Part of the undertaken task remains, part is over. Let the thrown anchor detain our ships here.)

The poet is halfway nished with his voyage, that is, with his poem, and stops for a moment on the open
sea. Shortly afterward, he cautions the young man, his student in the art of love, that they have completed
only half their journey:

uqid properas, iuuenis? mediis tua pinus in undis nauigat, et longe, quem peto, portus abest.

(2. 9–10)
 (Why are you hurrying, young man? Your ship is sailing in the middle of the waves, and the port to which I
am steering is far away.)

Again, the poem’s coming into being is portrayed as an ongoing process that the reader is following: the
32
middle of the work is the middle of the poet’s journey.

It is interesting to note that the connection of poetry and travelling may go back to the close association of
the two in magical, speci cally shamanistic, practice. Over sixty years ago, Karl Meuli argued in a
fascinating article (Meuli 1935) that epic poetry arose from the songs and narratives with which shamans in
di erent cultures accompany the toilsome and adventurous journeys (often to the Underworld) that they
experience once having fallen into a trance. Certain story patterns found in traditional narratives, especially
those concerning heroes who travel to fabulous lands in order to ful l some task, might thus re ect the
original shamanistic journey and journey narrative (Meuli 1935:164–76).

p. 23 For this primeval notion that travelling and singing or story-telling are at some level connected, we may
compare Bruce Chatwin’s book The Songlines, which explores the myths of the Australian Aborigines that
‘tell of the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out
the name of everything that crossed their path—birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes—and so singing
the world into existence’ (1987: 2). Modern-day Aborigines still go on journeys along these Songlines,
resinging the original songs of their Ancestors, which are inexorably linked to their invisible tracks across
the landscape of Australia (see Finnegan 1992: 116). It is not that the song describes the journey, but that the
journey and the song are one.

Having come this far in our exploration of the self-conscious poem, it is time to leave the area of general
poetics and to turn, more speci cally, to didactic poetry. However, I wish to end this chapter by pointing out
that the discussed features—‘self-consciousness’, ‘simultaneity’, and the use of journey metaphors— are
by no means restricted to poetry, but can be found in di erent genres of prose as well, and even in everyday
speech. Take, for example, this book: it is clearly self-conscious, that is, I have on numerous occasions
explicitly drawn attention to the fact that this is a book and that I am the one writing it. As the sentence at
the beginning of this paragraph shows, the text also operates along the lines of simultaneity and even uses a
watered-down version of the journey metaphor (‘having come this far’; ‘it is time to leave’). None of this
will strike the reader as out of the ordinary; in fact, he or she will be wholly familiar with rhetorical
strategies of this kind. Not surprisingly, the same features regularly appear in Greek and Roman prose:
speeches, for example, are often highly self-conscious and use self-referential statements to create the
impression of simultaneity (‘I now come to the end’; note also that Greek and Roman orators did not use
33
scripts, which made the illusion of composition-cum-performance even more convincing ); the driest
34
p. 24 prose treatises exhibit simultaneity (‘having discussed x, I now come to y’); speech or narrative is often
35
pictured as a movement in space; and even the fancy chariot and ship metaphors are applied to prose as
36
well as poetry.

However, the fact that self-consciousness, simultaneity, and certain types of imagery are not unique to
poetry does not, I believe, make them less interesting for the study of poetics. After all, many gures of
thought and speech can be found in both poetic and non-poetic discourse (as pointed out at the beginning of
the chapter, it may not even be possible to distinguish between poetry and non-poetry on purely formal
grounds), and the crucial di erence is simply the way in, and purpose to, which they are employed. To begin
a text with ‘In this book I examine the poetics of didactic poetry’ makes it a self-conscious scholarly
monograph; to start ‘I sing of arms and the man’ renders it a self-conscious poem.

Μουσάων Έλικωνιάδων ἀρχώμεθ’ ἀεíδειν.

Hesiod, Theogony

Therefore, my dear friend and companion, if you should think me somewhat sparing of my
narrative on my rst setting out,—bear with me,—and let me go on, and tell my story my own
way:—or, if I should seem now and then to tri e upon the road,—or should sometimes put on a
fool’s cap with a bell to it, for a moment or two as we pass along,—don’t y o ,— but rather
courteously give me credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon my outside;—and as we jog
on, either laugh with me, or at me, or in short, do any thing,—only keep your temper.

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

 Μουσάων Έλικωνιάδων ἀρχώμεθ’ ἀεíδειν.

Hesiod, Theogony

Therefore, my dear friend and companion, if you should think me somewhat sparing of my
narrative on my rst setting out,—bear with me,—and let me go on, and tell my story my own
way:—or, if I should seem now and then to tri e upon the road,—or should sometimes put on a
fool’s cap with a bell to it, for a moment or two as we pass along,—don’t y o ,— but rather
courteously give me credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon my outside;—and as we jog
on, either laugh with me, or at me, or in short, do any thing,—only keep your temper.

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

Almost everyone would intuitively agree that poetry is a kind of discourse distinct from ordinary, everyday
1
speech. However, where exactly the di erence lies is not that easy to tell, and the question of the criterion
2
by which to de ne the poetic has exercised critics since antiquity. One approach is to conceive of poetry in
purely formal terms. Thus, Gorgias declared, τὴν ποίηοιν ἄπασαν νκαὶ νομίζω καὶ ὀνομάζω λόγον ἔχοντα μέτρον (Hel. 9;
p. 7 cf. Koster 1970: 22–4·); that this connection of poetry and metre was perfectly commonplace in his time
(and, we may surmise, throughout antiquity) becomes clear from Aristotle, who complains about οἱ ἂνθρωποι.
b
… συνάπτοντες τῷ μέτρῳ τò πoιεῖv (Poet. 1447 l3–14). In the twentieth century, the view that the di erentia
speci ca of poetry can be located in formal characteristics, such as metre, formulas, or poetic language, was
rmly put forward by structuralist critics, especially the Prague School. For example, Roman Jakobson in a
famous article de ned the poetic function of language as directedness toward the ‘message’, that is, the
3
verbal sign itself (1960: esp. 353–6), and went on to discuss linguistic criteria for poetry.

The formalist view of poetry was criticized already in antiquity. Its most prominent opponent was Aristotle,
who regarded metre as a wholly unsatisfactory criterion and, taking up a concept found already in Plato (see
a
esp. Resp. 3. 392C9–394C8), de ned poetry as μίμὴσις (Poet. 1447 13–16). As is well known, this approach,
too, has been extremely successful in the history of Western literary theory, even though modern critics
often prefer to speak of ction rather than mimesis, stressing not so much the fact that poetry imitates (Gk.
μιμεῖσθαι) reality, but rather that in doing so, it creates (Lat. ngere) its own world.

It is obvious that both theories of what makes poetry special (or, to quote Jakobson 1960: 350, ‘[w]hat makes
a verbal message a work of art’) have much that speaks in their favour. As every reader knows, poems
typically show certain formal characteristics, and they also usually exhibit the speci c relationship to the
extra-poetic reality that we call mimesis or ction. However, as critics have pointed out, the same features
can, and often do, apply to ordinary speech as well: if we do not want to label ‘poetry’ every utterance that
accidentally takes the form of a verse or relates a made-up story, we are forced to admit that ‘ordinary
language’ is not that ordinary after all, and our basis for the distinction between poetic and non-poetic
discourse collapses (see Fish 1974; Pratt 1977: 38–78).

Still, we know that there is such a thing as poetry, and that it is somehow di erent from other forms of
speech. In fact, this knowledge may turn out to be the best criterion available for a text’s status as poetry
(literature): a certain type of discourse is poetry because people regard it as poetry, and because they regard
p. 8 it as poetry, they will pay attention to certain formal characteristics or consider the story untrue. As
Stanley Fish has phrased it, literature is ‘language around which we have drawn a frame, a frame that
indicates a decision to regard with a particular self-consciousness the resources language has always
possessed’ (1974: 24). In other words, poetry is an institution, a kind of speech that a society has marked as
special, with special rules applying to its production and reception (see esp. Schmidt 1972). Obviously, this
institution can be de ned di erently at di erent times and in di erent societies; thus, ‘poetry’ may be
glossed for a certain context as ‘divinely inspired song about gods and heroes’, for another as ‘carefully
crafted piece of writing to delight an educated readership’, and so on. The reason why I think it is useful to
refer to these di erent manifestations with the same term ‘poetry’, is—apart from its convenience—the
fact that, from a historical point of view, they all stand in the same tradition: at least since the fth century
BC, people have been talking about, and producing, ‘poetry’, even though they have meant quite di erent
things by it.

This brief survey of di erent theories of poetry has brought us back to—and con rmed—the observation
4
with which I started the chapter: poetry is a kind of speech that is set apart from ordinary discourse. It is, to
quote Stanley Fish again, language with a frame drawn around it. Typically, this frame is very clearly
 signalled. People recognize certain types of discourse as poetry, know the conventional markers that set this
particular kind of speech apart. When at a public festival in Classical Athens a man holding a sta recited
hexameters about the Trojan War, there was no way that the audience could have mistaken his words for,
say, an eyewitness account at a jury court or a casual story told to friends. Likewise, when we pick up a book
in the poetry section, we know that what we are going to read has a di erent status and functions according
to di erent rules from, for example, the e-mail message that we received from a colleague yesterday. Poetry
p. 9 is di erent because people regard it as di erent, and they regard it as di erent because there are certain
markers that tell them to do so. These markers may include occasion (cult festivals, poetry readings),
external form (books labelled ‘poetry’), internal form (verse, poetic language), content (traditional stories,
‘ ction’), and so on. Obviously there are always borderline cases (Jakobson 1960: 357 famously cites the
American campaign slogan ‘I like Ike’), but generally speaking, poetry is always recognized as such. Given
this fact, however, two interestingly di erent possibilities open up: a poem (identi ed by its audience or
readers as ‘poetry’, whatever it is that this means to them) can, in addition, explicitly present itself as
poetry or, otherwise, choose not to draw attention to this fact. The former kind is what I have called the
5
‘self-conscious poem’, and it is to this phenomenon that I now nally turn.

Consider, for example, the opening lines of Vergil’s Aeneid and of Propertius’ poem I. I respectively. The
phrase arma uirumque cano Troiae quipnmus ab oris not only identi es the content of the poem as ‘arms and
the man’; it also, with the help of the verb cano, clearly indicates that what we are reading is a poem and that
the rst-person speaker, who takes on the traditional role of the singing epic bard, is its poet. By contrast,
Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis gives no such indication, and neither does anything else in the
poem; rather, the elegy styles itself as the genuine speech of the lovesick rst person.

Now, obviously no one would be deceived into believing that Propertius I. I is not in fact a poem, but actually
the real confession of an unhappy and tormented man. There are plenty of unmistakable signs that this is
poetry, including the metre, the diction, and the fact that the elegy is found in a book which contains the
works of Sextus Propertius, whom we know as a poet. As pointed out above, poetry is nearly always easily
p. 10 recognizable as such, and Propertius 1. 1 is no exception. It di ers from a work such as the Aeneid only in
6
that the latter explicitly identi es itself as poetry and its speaker as the poet, whereas the elegy does not.
And it is poems that, like the Aeneid, show themselves to be ‘aware’ of their being poetry that are the subject
of the following investigation.

Before we look more closely at some of the typical characteristics of the self-conscious poem, there is one
question that arises from the preceding discussion. To talk about a poem that is ‘self-conscious’ or to ask
what a poem ‘has to say’ is obviously a personi cation, a gure of speech convenient for any critic who, like
me, wishes to avoid speaking of authorial intention. However, what I shall really examine in the following
discussions of single texts, and what I have focused on in my short look at the two lines from Vergil and
Propertius, are the utterances of the rst-person speaker or persona. I use these two terms interchangeably
to refer to a poem’s ‘I’ (German scholarship poetically speaks of the lyrisches Ich), the ctional, intra-
textual character who is understood as speaking the entire text of the poem, unless it is clearly indicated
7
that he or she is reporting someone else’s words.

To ascribe the words of the poem’s ‘I’ not to the actual author, but to a persona, has been customary in
8
literary scholarship for a number of decades; however, it has never been uncontroversial. Whoever wishes
to identify a poem’s speaker with its author can point rst of all to the fact that to do so has been standard
9
p. 11 practice in literary scholarship since antiquity. Thus, Plato and Aristotle, for example, distinguish types
of poetry in which ‘the poet speaks’ (as in dithyramb or the narrative parts of epic) from those where he
10
introduces other speakers (as in drama or epic speeches). In addition, the rst person of a poem may even
be identi ed with the author by name. Just within my small corpus of texts, for example, the speaker of the
Georgics is called Vergilius at 4. 563, while the Ovidian magister amoris names himself Naso at Ars amatoria 2.
11
744; 3. 812; and Remedia amoris 71 -2.

The most compelling reason for the identi cation of author and persona, however, remains the fact that in a
large number of poems, namely the ones that are ‘self-conscious’, the text itself makes this equation: arma
uirumque cano unmistakably presents the speaker as the poet and thus invites the readers to understand
12
that it is Vergil himself to whom they are listening. However, readers know (and I believe that even the
most naive readers do) that this invitation is treacherous: persona, after all, means ‘mask’, and masks can
resemble the people who wear them or be completely di erent. There is no way to nd out, if not backstage;
and in the interpretation of ancient poetry, there is no backstage.
 It therefore seems to me methodologically most sound to conduct my examination of poetry entirely on the
level of the persona, without trying to look behind the mask. This is in my eyes the only way to make
halfway veri able claims in the eld of literary interpretation in general; however, it is especially important
in the eld of poetics since the reconstruction of a self-conscious poem’s ‘idea of poetry’ typically relies
13
heavily on the rst-person statements of the poet/persona. Still, it should be stressed that the tendency of
many poems to imply that their speakers are their actual authors is an important aspect of their poetic
p. 12 strategies, and one of which even the most ‘anti-intentional’ critics should at least be aware, even if they
feel unable, as I do, to further investigate this relationship.

To return to poetic self-consciousness itself, it is obvious that poems can exhibit this feature to a greater or
lesser degree. After the initial invocation to the Muse, the Odyssey, for example, does not explicitly mention
its own status as divinely inspired song. The speaker of the Iliad, by contrast, returns to the Muses ve more
times (2. 484–93, 761–2; 11. 218–20; 14. 508–10; 16. 112–13) and on two occasions re ects on his own
di culties in telling the story (2. 485–6; 12.176). Compared with the poem as a whole, these passages still
do not amount to much. However, if we look at an epinician ode by Pindar or at Ovid’s Fasti, we nd that
these poems dedicate signi cant space to the persona’s talking about his poetic activity, with the result that
this appears as one of the major concerns, if not as the most important topic, of the entire poem (see,
speci cally on the Fasti, Volk 1997).

Generally speaking, the use of poetic self-consciousness does not appear to be governed by xed rules.
Poems may or may not draw attention to their status as poetry (to do so is never necessary—a poem will
always be recognized as such anyway), and they may do so more or less prominently. Nevertheless, there do
appear to be certain tendencies, having to do with genre: some genres typically show poetic self-
consciousness, others appear to discourage it. As has become clear from the short discussion of Propertius 1.
1, there are poems that try to give themselves the semblance of spontaneous real-life utterances and thus
avoid drawing attention to their status as poetry. This is often true of shorter forms such as elegy or lyric,
types of poems that purport to express their speakers’ subjective feelings or attitudes.

By contrast, other genres stress that they are poetry, or song, because it is this very fact that gives them
their cultural importance. This is typically the case for publicly performed choral lyric: Alcman’s Partheneion
or Pindar’s victory odes (or, for that matter, Horace’s Carmen saeculare) ful l the function of being songs
sung at a certain occasion where a song is called for. Not that what the song says is unimportant, but the
most important thing is that it is a song, and it therefore highlights this fact.

Epic lies somewhere in the middle. Epic poems never fail to identify their speaker with the poet; however,
p. 13 they tend to keep their rst person in the background and emphasize the story at the expense of the
teller. This is what has been called ‘epic objectivity’, which does not, however, imply that the narrative
14
cannot be focalized, that is, coloured by various points of view, including that of the narrator himself.

As I have discussed extensively in my article on Ovid’s Fasti (Volk 1997: 288–92), a text that presents itself
explicitly as poetry and identi es its persona as the poet typically exhibits a further feature, which I have
called poetic simultaneity. By this I mean the illusion that the poem is really only coming into being as it
evolves before the readers’ eyes, that the poet/persona is composing it ‘as we watch’. Thus at the beginning
15
of a poem, its composition is usually depicted as lying in the future or just about to begin: the speaker of
the Homeric epics asks the Muse to sing, which implies that the song is starting ‘right now’; the Homeric
Hymns often open with the announcement ἂρχομ’ ἀείδειν (2. 1; 11. 1; 13. 1; 16. 1; 22. 1; 26. 1; 28. 1) or a verb in the
16
future, such as ᾄσομαι/ἀείσομαι (6. 2; 10. 1; 15. 1; 23. 1; 30 1); and Vergil’s arma uirumque cano, with a verb in
the present, implies a beginning just as much as Ovid’s tempora cum causis… | … canam (Fast. 1.1–2), with the
17
same verb in the future. At the end of a poem, the speaker may refer to the completion of his work, as the
narrator of the Metamorphoses does in 15. 871–9: there, the phrase iamque opus exegi implies that the
composition of the work is viewed as lying just about in the past; contrast the proem (1. 1–4), where to
‘speak of shapes changed into new bodies’ was only a wish of the speaker (fert animus, 1), and he asked the
gods to assist his coepta (2), ‘undertakings’, literally ‘beginnings’. Similarly, the narrator of Apollonius’
Argonautica in 4. 1773–81 bids his heroes farewell since he is arriving at the end of their toils (ἤδὴ γὰρ ἐπῖκλντὰ
πείραθ’ ἱκάνω | ὑμετέρων καμάτων, 1775–6), and he imagines the future success of his song (1773–5).

p. 14 In the course of a poem, too, the speaker may refer to the ongoing process of his composition. He can
remind us of it only occasionally, as the speaker of the Iliad does in his internal invocations to the Muses
(see above), especially at prominent moments such as the beginnings or ends of books, or in so-called
18
‘proems in the middle’ (such as Aen. 7. 37–45). However, he can also choose to keep the readers aware of
 his poetic activity throughout the text. I have elsewhere tried to show this for Ovid’s Fasti, where, as I have
argued, the concentration on the speaker’s production of the poem is so strong that ‘what is usually called a
poem on the Roman calendar might as well be described as a poem about a poet writing a poem about the
Roman calendar’ (Volk 1997:291).

The Fasti may be an extreme example, but a large number of poems can be found that extensively exploit the
19
concept of poetic simultaneity. Take, for example, Horace, Odes 1. 12 (quern uirum aut heroa… ). This poem
praises a whole series of gods, demigods, and men, before culminating in the praise of Augustus, and for the
rst two-thirds of it, we are closely watching the poet/persona as he creates the song and following the
choices that he makes. He begins by asking Clio ‘which man or hero or god’ his song will celebrate (1–3);
after remaining unclear about his subject matter for the rst three stanzas, he starts treating individual
gods (13–24), demigods (25–32), and nally men (from 32), always re ecting on what he is doing. With the
help of expressions like quid prius dicam (13), neque te silebo (21), dicam (25), and Romulum post hos prius an
quietum | Pompili regnum memorem an superbos | Tarquini fascis, dubito, an Catonis | nobile letum (33–6), the
drama of the poem’s composition is unfolding before the readers’ eyes.

A speci c point that becomes apparent from Odes 1. 12 is that poetic simultaneity is not necessarily (in fact,
only rarely) used consistently throughout a poem: in the last third of the text, the speaker no longer talks
about his producing a song, but refers directly to his subject matter (the objects of his song no longer appear
as accusatives, together with verbs of speaking in the rst person, but rather as nominatives governing their
p. 15 own verbs). It is quite common for the impression of simultaneity to lapse in the course of a poem: many
poems have self-conscious proems; far fewer have epilogues.

Also, poetic simultaneity is hardly ever a case of cut-and-dried realism. Only rarely is the speaker
convincingly presented as in the process of composing the poem for the duration of the entire text. For
instance, the notion of the text as a nished, written object may come into con ict with the illusion that the
poem is coming into existence—being sung—only right now. This is the case in the proem to Fasti 1, for
example, where the speaker presents his work, paradoxically, both as a completed book that he dedicates to
Germanicus and as a project on which he is embarking right now and for which he enlists Germanicus’
20
help.

Conversely, the notion of poetic simultaneity is so powerful that it can be used even when it is, logically
speaking, inappropriate. Thus, Horace, Odes 3. 30 (exegi monumentum aere perennius), occurring at the end
of the jointly published rst three books of Odes, gives the impression of being spoken as the end of a
uni ed, self-conscious poem characterized by poetic simultaneity, while in reality it is the last of a
collection of clearly distinct and widely varying texts, few of which show poetic self-consciousness at all.
Vergil’s Eclogues present an even more striking case. The work is characterized by a multitude of voices;
after all, half the poems are spoken by divers dramatic characters, who are often poets in their own right
and perform songs, but who are not the poets of the songs in which they themselves appear. Despite this
somewhat anarchic situation (note also that the work does not have a proem that would clarify matters),
there sometimes emerges a persona who lays claim to being, as it were, the master poet and who pretends to
have been singing what we have been listening to all along. Thus, for example, the famous opening of
Eclogues 4, Sicelides Musae, paulo maiora canamus!, shows the speaker in the middle of the process of
producing poetry, implying that the part at which we have now arrived will be somewhat ‘grander’ than
what has preceded. Note also Eclogues 10, which the persona clearly presents as the conclusion of a work
p. 16 that has supposedly been going on for some time (see esp. extremum hunc, Arethusa, mihi concede laborem,
1 and haec sat erit, diuae, uestrum cecinisse poetam, 70).

Poetic simultaneity thus turns out to be a pervasive concept in ancient poetry. In fact, it is so common that
readers hardly notice it, and critics, too, generally fail to remark on it (though note the literature quoted in
n. 29). Often, it is no more than a topos, a literary convention without larger consequence. However, it can
also be employed to great e ect, and especially poems that are very self-conscious and have a strong
metapoetic tendency avail themselves of this feature. It is therefore worth while to enquire further into the
nature of this poetic technique and to try to understand its origin and historical development.

Looking once more at the rst line of the Aeneid, it is obvious, as mentioned above, that the poet/persona
presents himself as a singer (cano), despite the fact that Vergil certainly composed his epic in writing and
that, when the Aeneid was performed orally, it was read out or recited, not sung. The topos of the poet as
singer is, of course, perfectly familiar and persists into modern times, and as has become clear from the
preceding discussion, poetic simultaneity typically works along these same lines: the poem that is coming
 into being as it evolves is conceived of as a song sung by the poet; we are hardly ever given the impression
that we are looking over the poet’s shoulder as he is writing. The mention of writing usually occurs in
reference to the already nished book and is thus not easily reconcilable with the notion of poetic
21
simultaneity.

The poet as a singer who in performing his song is creating it, composing it as he goes along—this is the
scenario implied by poetic simultaneity, and a scenario that will sound oddly familiar to many classicists,
especially Hellenists. With the same words I could have described the famous Parry-Lord theory of oral
poetry, which revolutionized Homeric studies and according to which the oral poetry from which the
Homeric poems arose was characterized by the simultaneity of composition and performance. To quote
p. 17 Lord 1960:13, ‘composition and performance are two aspects of the same moment’; therefore, an ‘oral
poem is not composed for but in performance’.

If what poetic simultaneity evokes is the composition-cum-performance of oral poetry, it is most

reasonable to assume that this very traditional feature (found already in the Iliad) in fact originally goes
back to oral poetry. In an oral performance, poetic simultaneity is not a topos, but a fact: the speaker’s
references to his ongoing singing are literally true, just as the speaker himself is not a persona, but the
actual performer/poet. Once poetry ceases to be composed in performance, however, poetic simultaneity,
22
with its traditional features, such as invocations to the Muses, turns into a mere literary convention. Thus,
those kinds of statements that originally served to refer to the actual external performance situation come
to be used instead to create a ctive internal performance situation, a little intra-textual drama of the
23
poet/persona’s performing the song.

As classicists, we are never interpreting an oral composition-cum-performance, but always texts, whatever
exactly their origin, into whose making must have gone some of the premeditation involved in writing. I
therefore suggest that in treating poetic simultaneity (and self-referential statements in general), we
always regard it as a ction, just as it seems reasonable to me to speak always of the persona, and not of the
author. It should be noted, however, that while this principle might appear obvious to scholars dealing with
Hellenistic or Latin literature, it becomes more controversial once we turn to the criticism of Archaic Greek
poetry. After all, in this period, poetry was typically still performed (if not composed) orally, and critics
therefore have an understandable interest in the aspects of a text’s performance. Still, I would hold that it is
di cult, if not impossible, to reconstruct a poem’s performance situation on the basis of its self-referential
p. 18 statements. Even if a text was originally composed in performance, and its self-referential statements
were literally true, once it is reperformed, the self-referential statements come to refer to a ctive, internal
24
performance situation. If, as we have to assume for the majority of Archaic Greek poems, a text is
composed in advance in order to be orally performed, there are two possibilities. One option is for the poet
to devise the internal performance situation in such a way as to make it resemble as closely as possible the
supposed external performance situation. He can do so by being very general in all his references to the
singing of the song and its circumstances. Thus, in a song to be performed at a symposium, references to
the ongoing drinking and the friendship among those present will almost surely be appropriate and make
the song applicable to any similar situation (see Rösler 1983: 18–20). Conversely, the poet can try to be as
speci c as possible in his attempt to match the internal and external performance situations. This is
possible, of course, only if information about the particulars of the performance situation is available
25
beforehand. Consider the case of choral lyric, speci cally the kind where self-referential rst-person
26
statements are spoken in the voice of the chorus, such as the partheneia of Alcman and Pindar. As Mary
Lefkowitz has shown (1991: 11–25), texts of this kind abound in information about the ongoing
performance, including references to such features as dress and choreography. To make his words t the
facts, the poet must have a detailed knowledge of the projected performance, if not in fact be himself
involved in devising it.

However, the poet may instead decide not to have the internal performance situation match the external
one and thus to stress its status as ction. This, I would argue, is the case with the epinician odes of Pindar
p. 19 and Bacchylides, and it is already apparent from the fact that these songs were, as is generally believed,
27
performed not by the poet himself, but by a chorus, or otherwise a komos, while (unlike in the partheneia
discussed above) all self-referential rst-person statements refer to the poet and his composition-cum-
performance. Furthermore, the persona describes the process of creating the song in a way that is clearly
unrealistic, positively fantastic. Take a famous passage from Pindar (01. 6. 22 8), where the speaker asks to
be driven on the winner’s mule chariot through the ‘gates of hymns’ (27), along the ‘pure road’ (23), to
Pitane (28), a destination glossed as the Origin of men’ (24–5), that is, of the Iamidac. While the chariot is a
 real object and Pitane a real place, the ‘gates of hymns’, ‘pure road’, and ‘Origin of men’ clearly belong to
the realm of poetry alone. It is only inside the song that the poet goes on such a fantastic chariot ride (on
this image, see more below); the real performance situation, whatever its particulars, will obviously have
been wholly di erent.

Once oral performance has lost its importance and poetry is mainly written for readers, poetic simultaneity
can no longer even attempt to refer to a real situation. Any reference to the speaker’s composition-cum-
performance is clearly recognized as ctive: everyone knows that, for example, the cano in Aeneid 1. 1 is just
a topos. Without any real connection to the actual conditions of the poem’s composition and reception,
poetic simultaneity turns into a sophisticated metapoetic technique, employed by authors who wish to
present their poems as self-conscious works of art. It may even be argued that it is in a literate culture,
where poetry is mainly read, that poetic simultaneity comes to be used most extensively. In the case of
purely oral composition-cum-performance, there is no real need to refer to the ongoing process of the
poet’s singing, even though the individual artist may choose to do so, especially at crucial moments in the
course of the performance. However, once a writer wishes to create the illusion that the poem is only coming
into being (through the agency of the poet/persona) as it is unfolding before the readers’ eyes, he or she
28
must make a much greater e ort to establish this ctive situation and keep it up throughout the book. For
p. 20 example, Apollonius’ Argonautica, a typically ‘bookish’ Hellenistic poem, not only exhibits poetic
simultaneity, but, as Robert Albis has shown, speci cally attempts to recreate the performance situation of
Archaic Greek epic: Apollonius is striving to give the impression ‘that his studied poetry is composed
29
spontaneously and that this composition constitutes a performance’. As a result of this, however, the
Argonautica ends up a far more self-conscious poem than the Homeric epics that are its model, and it is the
speaker’s loquaciousness about his poetic activity and his very posing as an inspired bard that make it all
too clear to which period the poem really belongs. Poetic simultaneity may have its roots in the most archaic
oral poetry; however, it ourishes in the sophisticated and learned written literatures of a later age. To utter
cano smacks of the uates; but it is also a trademark of the poeta doctus.

I wish nally to have a look at some of the imagery typically associated with poetic simultaneity. The
metaphors I shall discuss are extremely archaic, but like poetic simultaneity in general, come to enjoy
special popularity in Hellenistic and Roman times, and they remain topoi throughout the Middle Ages and
beyond. Poetic simultaneity means to conceive of poetry as a process, a lengthy activity undertaken by the
poet (whom we are watching), with a clear beginning and an end. An image that suggests itself—that is, in
fact, already implicit in my use of the word ‘process’—is that of a journey: during his composition-cum-
performance, the poet travels on a certain route or along a path. ‘Path of song’ appears to be the meaning of
30
οἴμη, used three times in the Odyssey (8. 74, 481; 22. 347) to refer to ‘a speci c epic tale’; note also Hesiod,
p. 21 Works and Days 659, με … λιγυρῆς ἐπέβησαν ἀοιδῆς [sc. Μοῦσαι], and the phrase μεταβήσομαι ἂ λλον ἐς ὕμνον in the
transitional (!) formula at the end of a number of Homeric Hymns. The use of the path metaphor (not only as
an image for poetry, but also in other contexts) in Archaic and Classical Greek literature was studied
extensively by Otfried Becker in his monograph Das Bild des Weges (1937), and Marcello Durante (1958), in
particular, has demonstrated that to picture the poetic process as a journey is a concept that goes back to
Indo-European times.

The examples from Homer and Hesiod just quoted imply that the poet is travelling the path of song on foot.
However, it is more common to picture the poetic journey as either a chariot ride or a sea voyage. Both
images can be shown to be extremely old (see Durante 1958: 8–10 for Vedic parallels); they also remain
popular throughout antiquity and into modern times. Since these metaphors are familiar to classicists and
31
have been treated extensively by other scholars, there is no need for me to discuss them in detail. I wish
simply to demonstrate, with the help of two examples, how journey metaphors go together with poetic
simultaneity and by their nature tend to bolster the illusion that the creation of the poem is an ongoing
process. The rst is a famous passage in Pindar’s Pythian 4, where, in the middle of recounting the story of
Jason’s winning the Golden Fleece, the speaker interrupts himself with the words,

μακρά μοι νεῖσθαι κατ’ ἀμαξιτόν ὥρα γàρ συνάπτει- καί τινα οἶμον ἲσαμαι βραχύν

(247–8)

(It is far for me to travel on the road, for time is pressing, and I know some short path.)

While on his poetic journey, the poet suddenly decides to change his route and take a short cut: he
p. 22 summarizes the remaining story of Jason and Medea only very brie y (this is the οἶμος βραχύς) in order to
 move on quickly to his new topic. All this goes on in plain view, as it were, of the audience or reader: a true
instance of poetic simultaneity.

My second example involves the ship metaphor and comes from a text wholly di erent from the Pindaric
ode just cited. At the end of the rst book of Ovid’s Ars amatoria, the speaker signals a break:

pars superat coepti, pars est exhausta laboris; hic teneat nostras ancora iacta rates.

(1. 771–2)

(Part of the undertaken task remains, part is over. Let the thrown anchor detain our ships here.)

The poet is halfway nished with his voyage, that is, with his poem, and stops for a moment on the open
sea. Shortly afterward, he cautions the young man, his student in the art of love, that they have completed
only half their journey:

uqid properas, iuuenis? mediis tua pinus in undis nauigat, et longe, quem peto, portus abest.

(2. 9–10)

(Why are you hurrying, young man? Your ship is sailing in the middle of the waves, and the port to which I
am steering is far away.)

Again, the poem’s coming into being is portrayed as an ongoing process that the reader is following: the
32
middle of the work is the middle of the poet’s journey.

It is interesting to note that the connection of poetry and travelling may go back to the close association of
the two in magical, speci cally shamanistic, practice. Over sixty years ago, Karl Meuli argued in a
fascinating article (Meuli 1935) that epic poetry arose from the songs and narratives with which shamans in
di erent cultures accompany the toilsome and adventurous journeys (often to the Underworld) that they
experience once having fallen into a trance. Certain story patterns found in traditional narratives, especially
those concerning heroes who travel to fabulous lands in order to ful l some task, might thus re ect the
original shamanistic journey and journey narrative (Meuli 1935:164–76).

p. 23 For this primeval notion that travelling and singing or story-telling are at some level connected, we may
compare Bruce Chatwin’s book The Songlines, which explores the myths of the Australian Aborigines that
‘tell of the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out
the name of everything that crossed their path—birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes—and so singing
the world into existence’ (1987: 2). Modern-day Aborigines still go on journeys along these Songlines,
resinging the original songs of their Ancestors, which are inexorably linked to their invisible tracks across
the landscape of Australia (see Finnegan 1992: 116). It is not that the song describes the journey, but that the
journey and the song are one.

Having come this far in our exploration of the self-conscious poem, it is time to leave the area of general
poetics and to turn, more speci cally, to didactic poetry. However, I wish to end this chapter by pointing out
that the discussed features—‘self-consciousness’, ‘simultaneity’, and the use of journey metaphors— are
by no means restricted to poetry, but can be found in di erent genres of prose as well, and even in everyday
speech. Take, for example, this book: it is clearly self-conscious, that is, I have on numerous occasions
explicitly drawn attention to the fact that this is a book and that I am the one writing it. As the sentence at
the beginning of this paragraph shows, the text also operates along the lines of simultaneity and even uses a
watered-down version of the journey metaphor (‘having come this far’; ‘it is time to leave’). None of this
will strike the reader as out of the ordinary; in fact, he or she will be wholly familiar with rhetorical
strategies of this kind. Not surprisingly, the same features regularly appear in Greek and Roman prose:
speeches, for example, are often highly self-conscious and use self-referential statements to create the
impression of simultaneity (‘I now come to the end’; note also that Greek and Roman orators did not use
33
scripts, which made the illusion of composition-cum-performance even more convincing ); the driest
34
p. 24 prose treatises exhibit simultaneity (‘having discussed x, I now come to y’); speech or narrative is often
35
pictured as a movement in space; and even the fancy chariot and ship metaphors are applied to prose as
36
well as poetry.
 However, the fact that self-consciousness, simultaneity, and certain types of imagery are not unique to
poetry does not, I believe, make them less interesting for the study of poetics. After all, many gures of
thought and speech can be found in both poetic and non-poetic discourse (as pointed out at the beginning of
the chapter, it may not even be possible to distinguish between poetry and non-poetry on purely formal
grounds), and the crucial di erence is simply the way in, and purpose to, which they are employed. To begin
a text with ‘In this book I examine the poetics of didactic poetry’ makes it a self-conscious scholarly
monograph; to start ‘I sing of arms and the man’ renders it a self-conscious poem.

Almost everyone would intuitively agree that poetry is a kind of discourse distinct from ordinary, everyday
1
speech. However, where exactly the di erence lies is not that easy to tell, and the question of the criterion
2
by which to de ne the poetic has exercised critics since antiquity. One approach is to conceive of poetry in
purely formal terms. Thus, Gorgias declared, τὴν ποίηοιν ἄπασαν νκαὶ νομίζω καὶ ὀνομάζω λόγον ἔχοντα μέτρον (Hel. 9;
p. 7 cf. Koster 1970: 22–4·); that this connection of poetry and metre was perfectly commonplace in his time
(and, we may surmise, throughout antiquity) becomes clear from Aristotle, who complains about οἱ ἂνθρωποι.
b
… συνάπτοντες τῷ μέτρῳ τò πoιεῖv (Poet. 1447 l3–14). In the twentieth century, the view that the di erentia
speci ca of poetry can be located in formal characteristics, such as metre, formulas, or poetic language, was
rmly put forward by structuralist critics, especially the Prague School. For example, Roman Jakobson in a
famous article de ned the poetic function of language as directedness toward the ‘message’, that is, the
3
verbal sign itself (1960: esp. 353–6), and went on to discuss linguistic criteria for poetry.

The formalist view of poetry was criticized already in antiquity. Its most prominent opponent was Aristotle,
who regarded metre as a wholly unsatisfactory criterion and, taking up a concept found already in Plato (see
a
esp. Resp. 3. 392C9–394C8), de ned poetry as μίμὴσις (Poet. 1447 13–16). As is well known, this approach,
too, has been extremely successful in the history of Western literary theory, even though modern critics
often prefer to speak of ction rather than mimesis, stressing not so much the fact that poetry imitates (Gk.
μιμεῖσθαι) reality, but rather that in doing so, it creates (Lat. ngere) its own world.

It is obvious that both theories of what makes poetry special (or, to quote Jakobson 1960: 350, ‘[w]hat makes
a verbal message a work of art’) have much that speaks in their favour. As every reader knows, poems
typically show certain formal characteristics, and they also usually exhibit the speci c relationship to the
extra-poetic reality that we call mimesis or ction. However, as critics have pointed out, the same features
can, and often do, apply to ordinary speech as well: if we do not want to label ‘poetry’ every utterance that
accidentally takes the form of a verse or relates a made-up story, we are forced to admit that ‘ordinary
language’ is not that ordinary after all, and our basis for the distinction between poetic and non-poetic
discourse collapses (see Fish 1974; Pratt 1977: 38–78).

Still, we know that there is such a thing as poetry, and that it is somehow di erent from other forms of
speech. In fact, this knowledge may turn out to be the best criterion available for a text’s status as poetry
(literature): a certain type of discourse is poetry because people regard it as poetry, and because they regard
p. 8 it as poetry, they will pay attention to certain formal characteristics or consider the story untrue. As
Stanley Fish has phrased it, literature is ‘language around which we have drawn a frame, a frame that
indicates a decision to regard with a particular self-consciousness the resources language has always
possessed’ (1974: 24). In other words, poetry is an institution, a kind of speech that a society has marked as
special, with special rules applying to its production and reception (see esp. Schmidt 1972). Obviously, this
institution can be de ned di erently at di erent times and in di erent societies; thus, ‘poetry’ may be
glossed for a certain context as ‘divinely inspired song about gods and heroes’, for another as ‘carefully
crafted piece of writing to delight an educated readership’, and so on. The reason why I think it is useful to
refer to these di erent manifestations with the same term ‘poetry’, is—apart from its convenience—the
fact that, from a historical point of view, they all stand in the same tradition: at least since the fth century
BC, people have been talking about, and producing, ‘poetry’, even though they have meant quite di erent
things by it.

This brief survey of di erent theories of poetry has brought us back to—and con rmed—the observation
4
with which I started the chapter: poetry is a kind of speech that is set apart from ordinary discourse. It is, to
quote Stanley Fish again, language with a frame drawn around it. Typically, this frame is very clearly
signalled. People recognize certain types of discourse as poetry, know the conventional markers that set this
particular kind of speech apart. When at a public festival in Classical Athens a man holding a sta recited
hexameters about the Trojan War, there was no way that the audience could have mistaken his words for,
say, an eyewitness account at a jury court or a casual story told to friends. Likewise, when we pick up a book
 in the poetry section, we know that what we are going to read has a di erent status and functions according
to di erent rules from, for example, the e-mail message that we received from a colleague yesterday. Poetry
p. 9 is di erent because people regard it as di erent, and they regard it as di erent because there are certain
markers that tell them to do so. These markers may include occasion (cult festivals, poetry readings),
external form (books labelled ‘poetry’), internal form (verse, poetic language), content (traditional stories,
‘ ction’), and so on. Obviously there are always borderline cases (Jakobson 1960: 357 famously cites the
American campaign slogan ‘I like Ike’), but generally speaking, poetry is always recognized as such. Given
this fact, however, two interestingly di erent possibilities open up: a poem (identi ed by its audience or
readers as ‘poetry’, whatever it is that this means to them) can, in addition, explicitly present itself as
poetry or, otherwise, choose not to draw attention to this fact. The former kind is what I have called the
5
‘self-conscious poem’, and it is to this phenomenon that I now nally turn.

Consider, for example, the opening lines of Vergil’s Aeneid and of Propertius’ poem I. I respectively. The
phrase arma uirumque cano Troiae quipnmus ab oris not only identi es the content of the poem as ‘arms and
the man’; it also, with the help of the verb cano, clearly indicates that what we are reading is a poem and that
the rst-person speaker, who takes on the traditional role of the singing epic bard, is its poet. By contrast,
Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis gives no such indication, and neither does anything else in the
poem; rather, the elegy styles itself as the genuine speech of the lovesick rst person.

Now, obviously no one would be deceived into believing that Propertius I. I is not in fact a poem, but actually
the real confession of an unhappy and tormented man. There are plenty of unmistakable signs that this is
poetry, including the metre, the diction, and the fact that the elegy is found in a book which contains the
works of Sextus Propertius, whom we know as a poet. As pointed out above, poetry is nearly always easily
p. 10 recognizable as such, and Propertius 1. 1 is no exception. It di ers from a work such as the Aeneid only in
6
that the latter explicitly identi es itself as poetry and its speaker as the poet, whereas the elegy does not.
And it is poems that, like the Aeneid, show themselves to be ‘aware’ of their being poetry that are the subject
of the following investigation.

Before we look more closely at some of the typical characteristics of the self-conscious poem, there is one
question that arises from the preceding discussion. To talk about a poem that is ‘self-conscious’ or to ask
what a poem ‘has to say’ is obviously a personi cation, a gure of speech convenient for any critic who, like
me, wishes to avoid speaking of authorial intention. However, what I shall really examine in the following
discussions of single texts, and what I have focused on in my short look at the two lines from Vergil and
Propertius, are the utterances of the rst-person speaker or persona. I use these two terms interchangeably
to refer to a poem’s ‘I’ (German scholarship poetically speaks of the lyrisches Ich), the ctional, intra-
textual character who is understood as speaking the entire text of the poem, unless it is clearly indicated
7
that he or she is reporting someone else’s words.

To ascribe the words of the poem’s ‘I’ not to the actual author, but to a persona, has been customary in
8
literary scholarship for a number of decades; however, it has never been uncontroversial. Whoever wishes
to identify a poem’s speaker with its author can point rst of all to the fact that to do so has been standard
9
p. 11 practice in literary scholarship since antiquity. Thus, Plato and Aristotle, for example, distinguish types
of poetry in which ‘the poet speaks’ (as in dithyramb or the narrative parts of epic) from those where he
10
introduces other speakers (as in drama or epic speeches). In addition, the rst person of a poem may even
be identi ed with the author by name. Just within my small corpus of texts, for example, the speaker of the
Georgics is called Vergilius at 4. 563, while the Ovidian magister amoris names himself Naso at Ars amatoria 2.
11
744; 3. 812; and Remedia amoris 71 -2.

The most compelling reason for the identi cation of author and persona, however, remains the fact that in a
large number of poems, namely the ones that are ‘self-conscious’, the text itself makes this equation: arma
uirumque cano unmistakably presents the speaker as the poet and thus invites the readers to understand
12
that it is Vergil himself to whom they are listening. However, readers know (and I believe that even the
most naive readers do) that this invitation is treacherous: persona, after all, means ‘mask’, and masks can
resemble the people who wear them or be completely di erent. There is no way to nd out, if not backstage;
and in the interpretation of ancient poetry, there is no backstage.

It therefore seems to me methodologically most sound to conduct my examination of poetry entirely on the
level of the persona, without trying to look behind the mask. This is in my eyes the only way to make
halfway veri able claims in the eld of literary interpretation in general; however, it is especially important
in the eld of poetics since the reconstruction of a self-conscious poem’s ‘idea of poetry’ typically relies
 13
heavily on the rst-person statements of the poet/persona. Still, it should be stressed that the tendency of
many poems to imply that their speakers are their actual authors is an important aspect of their poetic
p. 12 strategies, and one of which even the most ‘anti-intentional’ critics should at least be aware, even if they
feel unable, as I do, to further investigate this relationship.

To return to poetic self-consciousness itself, it is obvious that poems can exhibit this feature to a greater or
lesser degree. After the initial invocation to the Muse, the Odyssey, for example, does not explicitly mention
its own status as divinely inspired song. The speaker of the Iliad, by contrast, returns to the Muses ve more
times (2. 484–93, 761–2; 11. 218–20; 14. 508–10; 16. 112–13) and on two occasions re ects on his own
di culties in telling the story (2. 485–6; 12.176). Compared with the poem as a whole, these passages still
do not amount to much. However, if we look at an epinician ode by Pindar or at Ovid’s Fasti, we nd that
these poems dedicate signi cant space to the persona’s talking about his poetic activity, with the result that
this appears as one of the major concerns, if not as the most important topic, of the entire poem (see,
speci cally on the Fasti, Volk 1997).

Generally speaking, the use of poetic self-consciousness does not appear to be governed by xed rules.
Poems may or may not draw attention to their status as poetry (to do so is never necessary—a poem will
always be recognized as such anyway), and they may do so more or less prominently. Nevertheless, there do
appear to be certain tendencies, having to do with genre: some genres typically show poetic self-
consciousness, others appear to discourage it. As has become clear from the short discussion of Propertius 1.
1, there are poems that try to give themselves the semblance of spontaneous real-life utterances and thus
avoid drawing attention to their status as poetry. This is often true of shorter forms such as elegy or lyric,
types of poems that purport to express their speakers’ subjective feelings or attitudes.

By contrast, other genres stress that they are poetry, or song, because it is this very fact that gives them
their cultural importance. This is typically the case for publicly performed choral lyric: Alcman’s Partheneion
or Pindar’s victory odes (or, for that matter, Horace’s Carmen saeculare) ful l the function of being songs
sung at a certain occasion where a song is called for. Not that what the song says is unimportant, but the
most important thing is that it is a song, and it therefore highlights this fact.

Epic lies somewhere in the middle. Epic poems never fail to identify their speaker with the poet; however,
p. 13 they tend to keep their rst person in the background and emphasize the story at the expense of the
teller. This is what has been called ‘epic objectivity’, which does not, however, imply that the narrative
14
cannot be focalized, that is, coloured by various points of view, including that of the narrator himself.

As I have discussed extensively in my article on Ovid’s Fasti (Volk 1997: 288–92), a text that presents itself
explicitly as poetry and identi es its persona as the poet typically exhibits a further feature, which I have
called poetic simultaneity. By this I mean the illusion that the poem is really only coming into being as it
evolves before the readers’ eyes, that the poet/persona is composing it ‘as we watch’. Thus at the beginning
15
of a poem, its composition is usually depicted as lying in the future or just about to begin: the speaker of
the Homeric epics asks the Muse to sing, which implies that the song is starting ‘right now’; the Homeric
Hymns often open with the announcement ἂρχομ’ ἀείδειν (2. 1; 11. 1; 13. 1; 16. 1; 22. 1; 26. 1; 28. 1) or a verb in the
16
future, such as ᾄσομαι/ἀείσομαι (6. 2; 10. 1; 15. 1; 23. 1; 30 1); and Vergil’s arma uirumque cano, with a verb in
the present, implies a beginning just as much as Ovid’s tempora cum causis… | … canam (Fast. 1.1–2), with the
17
same verb in the future. At the end of a poem, the speaker may refer to the completion of his work, as the
narrator of the Metamorphoses does in 15. 871–9: there, the phrase iamque opus exegi implies that the
composition of the work is viewed as lying just about in the past; contrast the proem (1. 1–4), where to
‘speak of shapes changed into new bodies’ was only a wish of the speaker (fert animus, 1), and he asked the
gods to assist his coepta (2), ‘undertakings’, literally ‘beginnings’. Similarly, the narrator of Apollonius’
Argonautica in 4. 1773–81 bids his heroes farewell since he is arriving at the end of their toils (ἤδὴ γὰρ ἐπῖκλντὰ
πείραθ’ ἱκάνω | ὑμετέρων καμάτων, 1775–6), and he imagines the future success of his song (1773–5).

p. 14 In the course of a poem, too, the speaker may refer to the ongoing process of his composition. He can
remind us of it only occasionally, as the speaker of the Iliad does in his internal invocations to the Muses
(see above), especially at prominent moments such as the beginnings or ends of books, or in so-called
18
‘proems in the middle’ (such as Aen. 7. 37–45). However, he can also choose to keep the readers aware of
his poetic activity throughout the text. I have elsewhere tried to show this for Ovid’s Fasti, where, as I have
argued, the concentration on the speaker’s production of the poem is so strong that ‘what is usually called a
poem on the Roman calendar might as well be described as a poem about a poet writing a poem about the
Roman calendar’ (Volk 1997:291).
 The Fasti may be an extreme example, but a large number of poems can be found that extensively exploit the
19
concept of poetic simultaneity. Take, for example, Horace, Odes 1. 12 (quern uirum aut heroa… ). This poem
praises a whole series of gods, demigods, and men, before culminating in the praise of Augustus, and for the
rst two-thirds of it, we are closely watching the poet/persona as he creates the song and following the
choices that he makes. He begins by asking Clio ‘which man or hero or god’ his song will celebrate (1–3);
after remaining unclear about his subject matter for the rst three stanzas, he starts treating individual
gods (13–24), demigods (25–32), and nally men (from 32), always re ecting on what he is doing. With the
help of expressions like quid prius dicam (13), neque te silebo (21), dicam (25), and Romulum post hos prius an
quietum | Pompili regnum memorem an superbos | Tarquini fascis, dubito, an Catonis | nobile letum (33–6), the
drama of the poem’s composition is unfolding before the readers’ eyes.

A speci c point that becomes apparent from Odes 1. 12 is that poetic simultaneity is not necessarily (in fact,
only rarely) used consistently throughout a poem: in the last third of the text, the speaker no longer talks
about his producing a song, but refers directly to his subject matter (the objects of his song no longer appear
as accusatives, together with verbs of speaking in the rst person, but rather as nominatives governing their
p. 15 own verbs). It is quite common for the impression of simultaneity to lapse in the course of a poem: many
poems have self-conscious proems; far fewer have epilogues.

Also, poetic simultaneity is hardly ever a case of cut-and-dried realism. Only rarely is the speaker
convincingly presented as in the process of composing the poem for the duration of the entire text. For
instance, the notion of the text as a nished, written object may come into con ict with the illusion that the
poem is coming into existence—being sung—only right now. This is the case in the proem to Fasti 1, for
example, where the speaker presents his work, paradoxically, both as a completed book that he dedicates to
Germanicus and as a project on which he is embarking right now and for which he enlists Germanicus’
20
help.

Conversely, the notion of poetic simultaneity is so powerful that it can be used even when it is, logically
speaking, inappropriate. Thus, Horace, Odes 3. 30 (exegi monumentum aere perennius), occurring at the end
of the jointly published rst three books of Odes, gives the impression of being spoken as the end of a
uni ed, self-conscious poem characterized by poetic simultaneity, while in reality it is the last of a
collection of clearly distinct and widely varying texts, few of which show poetic self-consciousness at all.
Vergil’s Eclogues present an even more striking case. The work is characterized by a multitude of voices;
after all, half the poems are spoken by divers dramatic characters, who are often poets in their own right
and perform songs, but who are not the poets of the songs in which they themselves appear. Despite this
somewhat anarchic situation (note also that the work does not have a proem that would clarify matters),
there sometimes emerges a persona who lays claim to being, as it were, the master poet and who pretends to
have been singing what we have been listening to all along. Thus, for example, the famous opening of
Eclogues 4, Sicelides Musae, paulo maiora canamus!, shows the speaker in the middle of the process of
producing poetry, implying that the part at which we have now arrived will be somewhat ‘grander’ than
what has preceded. Note also Eclogues 10, which the persona clearly presents as the conclusion of a work
p. 16 that has supposedly been going on for some time (see esp. extremum hunc, Arethusa, mihi concede
laborem, 1 and haec sat erit, diuae, uestrum cecinisse poetam, 70).

Poetic simultaneity thus turns out to be a pervasive concept in ancient poetry. In fact, it is so common that
readers hardly notice it, and critics, too, generally fail to remark on it (though note the literature quoted in
n. 29). Often, it is no more than a topos, a literary convention without larger consequence. However, it can
also be employed to great e ect, and especially poems that are very self-conscious and have a strong
metapoetic tendency avail themselves of this feature. It is therefore worth while to enquire further into the
nature of this poetic technique and to try to understand its origin and historical development.

Looking once more at the rst line of the Aeneid, it is obvious, as mentioned above, that the poet/persona
presents himself as a singer (cano), despite the fact that Vergil certainly composed his epic in writing and
that, when the Aeneid was performed orally, it was read out or recited, not sung. The topos of the poet as
singer is, of course, perfectly familiar and persists into modern times, and as has become clear from the
preceding discussion, poetic simultaneity typically works along these same lines: the poem that is coming
into being as it evolves is conceived of as a song sung by the poet; we are hardly ever given the impression
that we are looking over the poet’s shoulder as he is writing. The mention of writing usually occurs in
reference to the already nished book and is thus not easily reconcilable with the notion of poetic
21
simultaneity.
 The poet as a singer who in performing his song is creating it, composing it as he goes along—this is the
scenario implied by poetic simultaneity, and a scenario that will sound oddly familiar to many classicists,
especially Hellenists. With the same words I could have described the famous Parry-Lord theory of oral
poetry, which revolutionized Homeric studies and according to which the oral poetry from which the
Homeric poems arose was characterized by the simultaneity of composition and performance. To quote
p. 17 Lord 1960:13, ‘composition and performance are two aspects of the same moment’; therefore, an ‘oral
poem is not composed for but in performance’.

If what poetic simultaneity evokes is the composition-cum-performance of oral poetry, it is most

reasonable to assume that this very traditional feature (found already in the Iliad) in fact originally goes
back to oral poetry. In an oral performance, poetic simultaneity is not a topos, but a fact: the speaker’s
references to his ongoing singing are literally true, just as the speaker himself is not a persona, but the
actual performer/poet. Once poetry ceases to be composed in performance, however, poetic simultaneity,
22
with its traditional features, such as invocations to the Muses, turns into a mere literary convention. Thus,
those kinds of statements that originally served to refer to the actual external performance situation come
to be used instead to create a ctive internal performance situation, a little intra-textual drama of the
23
poet/persona’s performing the song.

As classicists, we are never interpreting an oral composition-cum-performance, but always texts, whatever
exactly their origin, into whose making must have gone some of the premeditation involved in writing. I
therefore suggest that in treating poetic simultaneity (and self-referential statements in general), we
always regard it as a ction, just as it seems reasonable to me to speak always of the persona, and not of the
author. It should be noted, however, that while this principle might appear obvious to scholars dealing with
Hellenistic or Latin literature, it becomes more controversial once we turn to the criticism of Archaic Greek
poetry. After all, in this period, poetry was typically still performed (if not composed) orally, and critics
therefore have an understandable interest in the aspects of a text’s performance. Still, I would hold that it is
di cult, if not impossible, to reconstruct a poem’s performance situation on the basis of its self-referential
p. 18 statements. Even if a text was originally composed in performance, and its self-referential statements
were literally true, once it is reperformed, the self-referential statements come to refer to a ctive, internal
24
performance situation. If, as we have to assume for the majority of Archaic Greek poems, a text is
composed in advance in order to be orally performed, there are two possibilities. One option is for the poet
to devise the internal performance situation in such a way as to make it resemble as closely as possible the
supposed external performance situation. He can do so by being very general in all his references to the
singing of the song and its circumstances. Thus, in a song to be performed at a symposium, references to
the ongoing drinking and the friendship among those present will almost surely be appropriate and make
the song applicable to any similar situation (see Rösler 1983: 18–20). Conversely, the poet can try to be as
speci c as possible in his attempt to match the internal and external performance situations. This is
possible, of course, only if information about the particulars of the performance situation is available
25
beforehand. Consider the case of choral lyric, speci cally the kind where self-referential rst-person
26
statements are spoken in the voice of the chorus, such as the partheneia of Alcman and Pindar. As Mary
Lefkowitz has shown (1991: 11–25), texts of this kind abound in information about the ongoing
performance, including references to such features as dress and choreography. To make his words t the
facts, the poet must have a detailed knowledge of the projected performance, if not in fact be himself
involved in devising it.

However, the poet may instead decide not to have the internal performance situation match the external
one and thus to stress its status as ction. This, I would argue, is the case with the epinician odes of Pindar
p. 19 and Bacchylides, and it is already apparent from the fact that these songs were, as is generally believed,
27
performed not by the poet himself, but by a chorus, or otherwise a komos, while (unlike in the partheneia
discussed above) all self-referential rst-person statements refer to the poet and his composition-cum-
performance. Furthermore, the persona describes the process of creating the song in a way that is clearly
unrealistic, positively fantastic. Take a famous passage from Pindar (01. 6. 22 8), where the speaker asks to
be driven on the winner’s mule chariot through the ‘gates of hymns’ (27), along the ‘pure road’ (23), to
Pitane (28), a destination glossed as the Origin of men’ (24–5), that is, of the Iamidac. While the chariot is a
real object and Pitane a real place, the ‘gates of hymns’, ‘pure road’, and ‘Origin of men’ clearly belong to
the realm of poetry alone. It is only inside the song that the poet goes on such a fantastic chariot ride (on
this image, see more below); the real performance situation, whatever its particulars, will obviously have
been wholly di erent.
 Once oral performance has lost its importance and poetry is mainly written for readers, poetic simultaneity
can no longer even attempt to refer to a real situation. Any reference to the speaker’s composition-cum-
performance is clearly recognized as ctive: everyone knows that, for example, the cano in Aeneid 1. 1 is just
a topos. Without any real connection to the actual conditions of the poem’s composition and reception,
poetic simultaneity turns into a sophisticated metapoetic technique, employed by authors who wish to
present their poems as self-conscious works of art. It may even be argued that it is in a literate culture,
where poetry is mainly read, that poetic simultaneity comes to be used most extensively. In the case of
purely oral composition-cum-performance, there is no real need to refer to the ongoing process of the
poet’s singing, even though the individual artist may choose to do so, especially at crucial moments in the
course of the performance. However, once a writer wishes to create the illusion that the poem is only coming
into being (through the agency of the poet/persona) as it is unfolding before the readers’ eyes, he or she
28
must make a much greater e ort to establish this ctive situation and keep it up throughout the book. For
p. 20 example, Apollonius’ Argonautica, a typically ‘bookish’ Hellenistic poem, not only exhibits poetic
simultaneity, but, as Robert Albis has shown, speci cally attempts to recreate the performance situation of
Archaic Greek epic: Apollonius is striving to give the impression ‘that his studied poetry is composed
29
spontaneously and that this composition constitutes a performance’. As a result of this, however, the
Argonautica ends up a far more self-conscious poem than the Homeric epics that are its model, and it is the
speaker’s loquaciousness about his poetic activity and his very posing as an inspired bard that make it all
too clear to which period the poem really belongs. Poetic simultaneity may have its roots in the most archaic
oral poetry; however, it ourishes in the sophisticated and learned written literatures of a later age. To utter
cano smacks of the uates; but it is also a trademark of the poeta doctus.

I wish nally to have a look at some of the imagery typically associated with poetic simultaneity. The
metaphors I shall discuss are extremely archaic, but like poetic simultaneity in general, come to enjoy
special popularity in Hellenistic and Roman times, and they remain topoi throughout the Middle Ages and
beyond. Poetic simultaneity means to conceive of poetry as a process, a lengthy activity undertaken by the
poet (whom we are watching), with a clear beginning and an end. An image that suggests itself—that is, in
fact, already implicit in my use of the word ‘process’—is that of a journey: during his composition-cum-
performance, the poet travels on a certain route or along a path. ‘Path of song’ appears to be the meaning of
30
οἴμη, used three times in the Odyssey (8. 74, 481; 22. 347) to refer to ‘a speci c epic tale’; note also Hesiod,
p. 21 Works and Days 659, με … λιγυρῆς ἐπέβησαν ἀοιδῆς [sc. Μοῦσαι], and the phrase μεταβήσομαι ἂ λλον ἐς ὕμνον in the
transitional (!) formula at the end of a number of Homeric Hymns. The use of the path metaphor (not only as
an image for poetry, but also in other contexts) in Archaic and Classical Greek literature was studied
extensively by Otfried Becker in his monograph Das Bild des Weges (1937), and Marcello Durante (1958), in
particular, has demonstrated that to picture the poetic process as a journey is a concept that goes back to
Indo-European times.

The examples from Homer and Hesiod just quoted imply that the poet is travelling the path of song on foot.
However, it is more common to picture the poetic journey as either a chariot ride or a sea voyage. Both
images can be shown to be extremely old (see Durante 1958: 8–10 for Vedic parallels); they also remain
popular throughout antiquity and into modern times. Since these metaphors are familiar to classicists and
31
have been treated extensively by other scholars, there is no need for me to discuss them in detail. I wish
simply to demonstrate, with the help of two examples, how journey metaphors go together with poetic
simultaneity and by their nature tend to bolster the illusion that the creation of the poem is an ongoing
process. The rst is a famous passage in Pindar’s Pythian 4, where, in the middle of recounting the story of
Jason’s winning the Golden Fleece, the speaker interrupts himself with the words,

μακρά μοι νεῖσθαι κατ’ ἀμαξιτόν ὥρα γàρ συνάπτει- καί τινα οἶμον ἲσαμαι βραχύν

(247–8)

(It is far for me to travel on the road, for time is pressing, and I know some short path.)

While on his poetic journey, the poet suddenly decides to change his route and take a short cut: he
p. 22 summarizes the remaining story of Jason and Medea only very brie y (this is the οἶμος βραχύς) in order to
move on quickly to his new topic. All this goes on in plain view, as it were, of the audience or reader: a true
instance of poetic simultaneity.

My second example involves the ship metaphor and comes from a text wholly di erent from the Pindaric
ode just cited. At the end of the rst book of Ovid’s Ars amatoria, the speaker signals a break:
 pars superat coepti, pars est exhausta laboris; hic teneat nostras ancora iacta rates.

(1. 771–2)

(Part of the undertaken task remains, part is over. Let the thrown anchor detain our ships here.)

The poet is halfway nished with his voyage, that is, with his poem, and stops for a moment on the open
sea. Shortly afterward, he cautions the young man, his student in the art of love, that they have completed
only half their journey:

uqid properas, iuuenis? mediis tua pinus in undis nauigat, et longe, quem peto, portus abest.

(2. 9–10)

(Why are you hurrying, young man? Your ship is sailing in the middle of the waves, and the port to which I
am steering is far away.)

Again, the poem’s coming into being is portrayed as an ongoing process that the reader is following: the
32
middle of the work is the middle of the poet’s journey.

It is interesting to note that the connection of poetry and travelling may go back to the close association of
the two in magical, speci cally shamanistic, practice. Over sixty years ago, Karl Meuli argued in a
fascinating article (Meuli 1935) that epic poetry arose from the songs and narratives with which shamans in
di erent cultures accompany the toilsome and adventurous journeys (often to the Underworld) that they
experience once having fallen into a trance. Certain story patterns found in traditional narratives, especially
those concerning heroes who travel to fabulous lands in order to ful l some task, might thus re ect the
original shamanistic journey and journey narrative (Meuli 1935:164–76).

p. 23 For this primeval notion that travelling and singing or story-telling are at some level connected, we may
compare Bruce Chatwin’s book The Songlines, which explores the myths of the Australian Aborigines that
‘tell of the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out
the name of everything that crossed their path—birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes—and so singing
the world into existence’ (1987: 2). Modern-day Aborigines still go on journeys along these Songlines,
resinging the original songs of their Ancestors, which are inexorably linked to their invisible tracks across
the landscape of Australia (see Finnegan 1992: 116). It is not that the song describes the journey, but that the
journey and the song are one.

Having come this far in our exploration of the self-conscious poem, it is time to leave the area of general
poetics and to turn, more speci cally, to didactic poetry. However, I wish to end this chapter by pointing out
that the discussed features—‘self-consciousness’, ‘simultaneity’, and the use of journey metaphors— are
by no means restricted to poetry, but can be found in di erent genres of prose as well, and even in everyday
speech. Take, for example, this book: it is clearly self-conscious, that is, I have on numerous occasions
explicitly drawn attention to the fact that this is a book and that I am the one writing it. As the sentence at
the beginning of this paragraph shows, the text also operates along the lines of simultaneity and even uses a
watered-down version of the journey metaphor (‘having come this far’; ‘it is time to leave’). None of this
will strike the reader as out of the ordinary; in fact, he or she will be wholly familiar with rhetorical
strategies of this kind. Not surprisingly, the same features regularly appear in Greek and Roman prose:
speeches, for example, are often highly self-conscious and use self-referential statements to create the
impression of simultaneity (‘I now come to the end’; note also that Greek and Roman orators did not use
33
scripts, which made the illusion of composition-cum-performance even more convincing ); the driest
34
p. 24 prose treatises exhibit simultaneity (‘having discussed x, I now come to y’); speech or narrative is often
35
pictured as a movement in space; and even the fancy chariot and ship metaphors are applied to prose as
36
well as poetry.

However, the fact that self-consciousness, simultaneity, and certain types of imagery are not unique to
poetry does not, I believe, make them less interesting for the study of poetics. After all, many gures of
thought and speech can be found in both poetic and non-poetic discourse (as pointed out at the beginning of
the chapter, it may not even be possible to distinguish between poetry and non-poetry on purely formal
grounds), and the crucial di erence is simply the way in, and purpose to, which they are employed. To begin
a text with ‘In this book I examine the poetics of didactic poetry’ makes it a self-conscious scholarly
monograph; to start ‘I sing of arms and the man’ renders it a self-conscious poem.
Notes
1 For my use of the word poetry, see the Introduction, above. Note that in the following survey of theoretical approaches to
defining poetry, ʻpoetryʼ could o en, and will sometimes, be glossed with ʻliteratureʼ, in the sense in which the term is
used in modern philologies: ʻEnglish literatureʼ means ʻEnglish novels, poems, plays, etc.ʼ, i.e., it refers to fictional writing;
to the classicist, by contrast, any kind of written discourse usually qualifies as ʻliteratureʼ. When it comes to ancient texts,
ʻliteratureʼ in the narrower sense is almost exclusively restricted to ʻpoetryʼ (discourse in verse), except for some
comparatively late genres, such as the novel. Critics who have developed their theories apropos of modern forms of
writing tend to speak of ʻliteratureʼ, but I believe that their approaches can be applied to ancient ʻpoetryʼ, as well. Note that
I have outlined some of the ideas developed in this chapter already in my article on Ovidʼs Fasti (Volk 1997), to which I
shall from time to time refer.
2 For the following discussion, see esp. Guller 1997: 18–42; see also Dalzell 1996: 12–18, esp. 17–18 and Dover 1997: 182–3,
as well as the papers in Hernadi (ed.) 1978.
3 For a useful, though fiercely polemical, survey of structuralist theories of poetic language, see Pratt 1977: 3–37.
4 It must be stressed that this ʻothernessʼ of poetry is not a concept unique to modern aesthetics, where a poem is viewed as
an autonomous piece of art, but that it is characteristic also, and especially, of traditional and oral cultures. Compare the
comments of Ruth Finnegan, who notes apropos of oral poetry that typically a ʻpoem is, as it were, italicised, set apart
from everyday life and languageʼ (1992: 25–8, at 25), and of Calvert Watkins (1995:183), who in treating Indo-European
poetics remarks that the ʻtotal e ect of all forms of poetic technique is going to be a distancing of the poetic message from
ordinary human languageʼ (here Watkins explicitly follows the Jakobsonian model).
5 A note on terminology: I use ʻself-consciousʼ to refer to poetry that explicitly identifies itself as poetry (as discussed in
detail in the course of this chapter); a self-conscious poem is one that shows itself, as it were, ʻawareʼ of its own being
poetry. By contrast, I employ ʻmeta-poeticʼ to describe any poetic utterance that I understand as making explicit or
implicit reference to poetry, either to the particular poem or to poetry in general (thus, e.g., the Callimachean dictum oὺδέ
κελεύθῳ |χαίρω, τίς πολλούς ᾧδε καὶ ᾧδε Φέρει (Epigr. 28. 1–2) can be taken as metapoetic, i.e., as implicitly making a
comment about poetry). Finally, ʻself-referentialʼ denotes, not surprisingly, any utterance that refers to itself. Self-
referentiality is not restricted to poetry, of course (neither, in fact, is self-consciousness; see below in the text), witness,
e.g., the phrase ʻI now come to the endʼ in speeches. There are obviously areas where ʻself-consciousʼ, ʻmetapoeticʼ, and
ʻself-referentialʼ overlap, and other scholars may employ these terms somewhat di erently from the way I do, but I hope
that my usage will be clear.
6 Note that lack of poetic self-consciousness does not mean lack of metapoetic potential (for the di erence between self-
conscious and metapoetic, see n. 5, above): there are many ways in which poems that do not explicitly present
themselves as poetry can still be under stood as implicitly commenting on their own being poetry and on poetry in
general. Propertius I.I, for example, can be read as programmatic in terms of the speakerʼs role as not only an elegiac lover,
but also an elegiac poet: it is a rule of the genre of love elegy that being a lover and being an elegist are presented as being
just two aspects of the same way of life. Other methods of covert metapoetic reflection cannot be discussed here; as is
well known, the phenomenon has been a popular topic in recent classical scholarship.
7 Unlike some scholars, I will not use the term ʻnarratorʼ to refer to the speakers of the didactic poems I treat since I do not
believe that these texts as wholes (as opposed to some of their parts, such as longer mythological digressions) can be
classed as narratives. A narrative is typically the treatment of ʻa chronological series of events caused or experienced by
characters in a fictional worldʼ (thus the definition in De Jong 1987 (glossary) of what narratologists refer to as the fabula),
a description that does not apply to didactic poetry.
8 For a survey of the history and fortune of the literary persona, see Elliott 1982; see also Clay 1998b: 13–16 on the discovery
of the persona in classical scholarship.
9 For the ancientsʼ awareness (or, for the most part, lack thereof) of what we call the literary persona, see Clay 1998b.
a a
10 PI. Resp. 3.392c9–394c8; Arist. Poet. 1448 20–4, 1460 5–11. Note Platoʼs very clear assessment of Il. 1–14: λέγει … αὐτòς ὁ
:
ποιητής καὶ οὐδέ ἐπιχειρέῖ ἡμῶν τὴν διάνοιαν ἄλλοσε τρέπειν, ώς άλλος τ ι ς ὁ λέγων ἢ αὐτός (393a6–7)·Cf. Clay 1998b
23–8.
11 Of earlier didactic poets, Nicander names himself at Ther. 957 and Alex. 629, while both Empedocles and Aratus may be
hiding their names in puns (see Obbink 1993: 87–8 and n. 93 and Bing 1990).
12 By extension, even in the case of poems that are not self-conscious, readers have a tendency to automatically identify the
persona with the author, unless there is a clear indication that the speaker is someone else.
13 Note that while I use persona for the intra-textual character and author for the extra- textual historical figure, the term
poet applies to both—even though I shall mostly employ it to denote the persona in his role as (purported) creator of the
text.
14 See De Jong 1987 on narrators and focalizers in the Iliad. The distinction between instances where the narratorʼs
perspective, reactions, and opinions colour the narrative and those ʻself-consciousʼ moments where he steps forward and
identifies himself as the narrator/poet is very important and not always clearly drawn by scholars.
15 Cf. Pfeij er 1999: 33–43, specifically on Pindar.
16 The Homenc Hymns probably functioned as real beginnings, or ʻproemsʼ, in the performance of epic: they were the singersʼ
more personal introductions that preceded the performance of the epic poems proper (see, e.g., Ford 1992: 23–31). Note
that elsewhere in this book I use the word ʻproemʼ more generally to refer to any kind of introduction to a poem.
17 See Conte 1992: 147 on the liminal status of the proem: ʻAt the border between fully poetic speech and speech still outside
of poetry, the proem—the preliminary announcement of a poem which follows—is already song and not yet song.ʼ
18 On proems in the middle as a typical place for metapoetic reflection in Alexandrian and Roman poetry, see Conte 1992.
19 As is well known, this beginning is modelled on Pindar (01. 2. 1–2), to whom the poem may also in part owe its general
stance of poetic self-consciousness.
20 See Volk 1997: 291–2, with further examples, as well as now Wheeler 1999: 44–8 (though I cannot agree with the authorʼs
contention that the Fasti generally presents itself as written text, in contrast to the supposed oral nature of the
Metamorphoses). On the importance of ʻoralityʼ for the concept of poetic simultaneity, see below.
21 One of the few examples of a reference to writing in the context of poetic simultaneity is Lucr. 1. 24–6, te [sc. Venerem]
sociam studeo scribendis uersibus esse | quos ego de rerum natura pangere conor I Memmiadae nostro (see Sect. 3.2,
below). Both the gerundive scribendis and the verb conor show that the speaker is only just starting on his poem. Another
instance is Ov. Fast. 1. 93, haec ego cum sumptis agitarem mente tabellis, where the mention of the writing tablets has the
main purpose of evoking the passage in Callimachusʼ Aetia prologue on which this scene is modelled (see Volk 1997: 295–
6). Generally on ʻsingingʼ v. ʻwritingʼ in Greek and esp. Latin poetry, see Lowrie 1997: 55–70 (in the context of a discussion
of Horaceʼs Odes).
22 See Albis 1996: 8–9 on the convention of invoking the Muse(s) at the beginning of a poem: ʻEven much later in the history
of Greek literature, when poetry was no longer orally composed, inspiration was still associated with performance. When a
poet invokes his Muse, he creates the impression that he is just then embarking on the process of composition, since
divine inspiration is conventionally a necessary prerequisite for starting a poemʼ (9).
23 Note that in principle, self-referential statements need not be literally true in the situation of composition-cum-
performance either: even the actually performing poet can create a Active speech situation.
24 Thus, to take a very simple example, Theognis I. 943–4, ἐγγύθεν αὐλητῆρος ἀείσομαι ὧδε καταστὰς ⃒δεξιός ἀθανάτοις
θεοῖσιν ἐπευνχόμενος, which may originally have been an ex tempore composition-cum-performance at a symposium,
can easily be reperformed even by someone standing le of the piper or without musical accompaniment—the listeners
will automatically regard these words as a fiction. See also Nagy 1996: 59–86 on reperformance of the Homeric poems as a
kind of re-enactment in which the rhapsode takes over the role of ʻHomerʼ, i.e., of the poemʼs ʻIʼ.
25 I here ignore the possibility of improvisation during performance, always a given, esp. in less formal settings.
26 On the di erence between the choral ʻIʼ and the poetʼs ʻIʼ, see Lefkowitz 1991: 1–71. Note that texts of this kind exhibit a
rather special kind of poetic self-consciousness not hitherto considered: they explicitly present themselves as poetry, but
the speaker is not the poet, but the performer(s).
27 On the controversy over ʻWho sang Pindarʼs Victory Odes?ʼ, see the (necessarily partial) survey in Lefkowitz 1995. As will
become clear from the following, I am extremely sceptical as to whether this question can be answered on the basis of the
texts.
28 We may compare the use of addresses to the audience; Finnegan 1992: 118 notes that these are rather uncommon in oral
poetry. This might appear surprising, but then, in an oral performance, it is always clear that the poet is performing for an
audience, at which his words are directed. By contrast, the reason why, e.g., didactic poetry typically abounds in direct
addresses to the student(s) (see Sect. 2.2, below) is precisely the fact that the entire teacher-student constellation is a
fiction that is constituted, not reflected, by these repeated addresses.
29 Albis 1996:10; see ch. 1 passim. Albis comes close to a treatment of the phenomenon that I call poetic simultaneity (when
I wrote my article on the Fasti, the book was not yet known to me), but, since he focuses exclusively on Apollonius, he
does not take account of the wider implications of his argument. The same is true for Wheeler who, in his narratological
study of the Metamorphoses, observes that ʻOvid presents his poem as a fictive viva-voce perfor manceʼ (1999: 3),
apparently without realizing that many other (esp. epic) poems work along the same lines. Cf. also Pfeij er (1999: 34) who
aptly writes about Pindar that he is ʻat pains to create the illusion that his odes take shape at the very spot, fictionally
representing the process of compositionʼ.
30 The etymology of οἴμη is unclear, but it appears reasonable to connect it with οἶμος ʻpathʼ (itself of obscure etymology),
which is first used metapoetically in Hymn. Hom. Merc. 451 (οἶμος ἀοιδῆς); see Chantraine 1968–80 and Frisk 1960–72 s.vv.
οἴμη and οἶμος.
31 In addition to Becker 1937 and Durante 1958, see now esp. Asper 1997: 21–107 (with special focus on Callimachus) and the
comprehensive treatment of Nünlist 1998: 228–83. See in addition Giannisi 1997 for the idea of ʻspeech as progressʼ in
Greek culture; Kuhlmann 1906: 20–2 and 24 6 for a collection of Greek passages; Ford 1992: 40–8 on the ʻtopical poeticsʼ of
Homer; Steiner 1986: 76–86 on the path metaphor in Pindar; Wimmel 1960: 103–11 on the ʻSymbolgruppen des Wegesʼ in
Callimachus and his Roman followers; Norden 1891: 274–6 specifically on the chariot metaphor; and Lieberg 1969 and
Curtius 1948: 136–8 on seafaring imagery.
32 On these Ovidian passages, see also the discussion below in Sect. 5.2.
33 It is interesting to note that in order to deliver long speeches without written notes, orators used a memorization
technique that itself involved a mental movement through space (see Yates 1966: 1–26; Giannisi 1997: 139 and n. 20). As
discussed, e.g., by Quintilian (Inst. 11. 2. 17–22), the speaker would in his imagination place the single details he wished to
remember in certain places, e.g., inside a familiar house. In order to recall them in order, he would then have to ʻwalkʼ
through this imagined location and ʻpick them upʼ. Thus, to quote Frances Yates,ʼ ʻ[w]e have to think of the ancient orator
as moving in imagination through his memory building whilst he is making his speech, drawing from the memorised
places the images he has placed on themʼ (1966: 3).
34 See Fuhrmann 1960: 28, 57, 69, 77–8, 97–8, 120–1, 142 and n. 2, and index s.v. ʻÜberleitungsformelnʼ.
35 See Durante 1958: 3–4; Becker 1937: 101–16 (on the ʻWeg des λόγοςʼ in Herodotus). Compare in English the use of dead
metaphors like ʻcome toʼ, ʻgo overʼ, ʻleave asideʼ, etc. to refer to speech.
36 See Norden 1891: 274–5 (chariot) and Curtius 1948: 137 (ship).
1 For my use of the word poetry, see the Introduction, above. Note that in the following survey of theoretical approaches to
defining poetry, ʻpoetryʼ could o en, and will sometimes, be glossed with ʻliteratureʼ, in the sense in which the term is
 used in modern philologies: ʻEnglish literatureʼ means ʻEnglish novels, poems, plays, etc.ʼ, i.e., it refers to fictional writing;
to the classicist, by contrast, any kind of written discourse usually qualifies as ʻliteratureʼ. When it comes to ancient texts,
ʻliteratureʼ in the narrower sense is almost exclusively restricted to ʻpoetryʼ (discourse in verse), except for some
comparatively late genres, such as the novel. Critics who have developed their theories apropos of modern forms of
writing tend to speak of ʻliteratureʼ, but I believe that their approaches can be applied to ancient ʻpoetryʼ, as well. Note that
I have outlined some of the ideas developed in this chapter already in my article on Ovidʼs Fasti (Volk 1997), to which I
shall from time to time refer.
2 For the following discussion, see esp. Guller 1997: 18–42; see also Dalzell 1996: 12–18, esp. 17–18 and Dover 1997: 182–3,
as well as the papers in Hernadi (ed.) 1978.
3 For a useful, though fiercely polemical, survey of structuralist theories of poetic language, see Pratt 1977: 3–37.
4 It must be stressed that this ʻothernessʼ of poetry is not a concept unique to modern aesthetics, where a poem is viewed as
an autonomous piece of art, but that it is characteristic also, and especially, of traditional and oral cultures. Compare the
comments of Ruth Finnegan, who notes apropos of oral poetry that typically a ʻpoem is, as it were, italicised, set apart
from everyday life and languageʼ (1992: 25–8, at 25), and of Calvert Watkins (1995:183), who in treating Indo-European
poetics remarks that the ʻtotal e ect of all forms of poetic technique is going to be a distancing of the poetic message from
ordinary human languageʼ (here Watkins explicitly follows the Jakobsonian model).
5 A note on terminology: I use ʻself-consciousʼ to refer to poetry that explicitly identifies itself as poetry (as discussed in
detail in the course of this chapter); a self-conscious poem is one that shows itself, as it were, ʻawareʼ of its own being
poetry. By contrast, I employ ʻmeta-poeticʼ to describe any poetic utterance that I understand as making explicit or
implicit reference to poetry, either to the particular poem or to poetry in general (thus, e.g., the Callimachean dictum oὺδέ
κελεύθῳ |χαίρω, τίς πολλούς ᾧδε καὶ ᾧδε Φέρει (Epigr. 28. 1–2) can be taken as metapoetic, i.e., as implicitly making a
comment about poetry). Finally, ʻself-referentialʼ denotes, not surprisingly, any utterance that refers to itself. Self-
referentiality is not restricted to poetry, of course (neither, in fact, is self-consciousness; see below in the text), witness,
e.g., the phrase ʻI now come to the endʼ in speeches. There are obviously areas where ʻself-consciousʼ, ʻmetapoeticʼ, and
ʻself-referentialʼ overlap, and other scholars may employ these terms somewhat di erently from the way I do, but I hope
that my usage will be clear.
6 Note that lack of poetic self-consciousness does not mean lack of metapoetic potential (for the di erence between self-
conscious and metapoetic, see n. 5, above): there are many ways in which poems that do not explicitly present
themselves as poetry can still be under stood as implicitly commenting on their own being poetry and on poetry in
general. Propertius I.I, for example, can be read as programmatic in terms of the speakerʼs role as not only an elegiac lover,
but also an elegiac poet: it is a rule of the genre of love elegy that being a lover and being an elegist are presented as being
just two aspects of the same way of life. Other methods of covert metapoetic reflection cannot be discussed here; as is
well known, the phenomenon has been a popular topic in recent classical scholarship.
7 Unlike some scholars, I will not use the term ʻnarratorʼ to refer to the speakers of the didactic poems I treat since I do not
believe that these texts as wholes (as opposed to some of their parts, such as longer mythological digressions) can be
classed as narratives. A narrative is typically the treatment of ʻa chronological series of events caused or experienced by
characters in a fictional worldʼ (thus the definition in De Jong 1987 (glossary) of what narratologists refer to as the fabula),
a description that does not apply to didactic poetry.
8 For a survey of the history and fortune of the literary persona, see Elliott 1982; see also Clay 1998b: 13–16 on the discovery
of the persona in classical scholarship.
9 For the ancientsʼ awareness (or, for the most part, lack thereof) of what we call the literary persona, see Clay 1998b.
a a
10 PI. Resp. 3.392c9–394c8; Arist. Poet. 1448 20–4, 1460 5–11. Note Platoʼs very clear assessment of Il. 1–14: λέγει … αὐτòς ὁ
:
ποιητής καὶ οὐδέ ἐπιχειρέῖ ἡμῶν τὴν διάνοιαν ἄλλοσε τρέπειν, ώς άλλος τ ι ς ὁ λέγων ἢ αὐτός (393a6–7)·Cf. Clay 1998b
23–8.
11 Of earlier didactic poets, Nicander names himself at Ther. 957 and Alex. 629, while both Empedocles and Aratus may be
hiding their names in puns (see Obbink 1993: 87–8 and n. 93 and Bing 1990).
12 By extension, even in the case of poems that are not self-conscious, readers have a tendency to automatically identify the
persona with the author, unless there is a clear indication that the speaker is someone else.
13 Note that while I use persona for the intra-textual character and author for the extra- textual historical figure, the term
poet applies to both—even though I shall mostly employ it to denote the persona in his role as (purported) creator of the
text.
14 See De Jong 1987 on narrators and focalizers in the Iliad. The distinction between instances where the narratorʼs
perspective, reactions, and opinions colour the narrative and those ʻself-consciousʼ moments where he steps forward and
identifies himself as the narrator/poet is very important and not always clearly drawn by scholars.
15 Cf. Pfeij er 1999: 33–43, specifically on Pindar.
16 The Homenc Hymns probably functioned as real beginnings, or ʻproemsʼ, in the performance of epic: they were the singersʼ
more personal introductions that preceded the performance of the epic poems proper (see, e.g., Ford 1992: 23–31). Note
that elsewhere in this book I use the word ʻproemʼ more generally to refer to any kind of introduction to a poem.
17 See Conte 1992: 147 on the liminal status of the proem: ʻAt the border between fully poetic speech and speech still outside
of poetry, the proem—the preliminary announcement of a poem which follows—is already song and not yet song.ʼ
18 On proems in the middle as a typical place for metapoetic reflection in Alexandrian and Roman poetry, see Conte 1992.
19 As is well known, this beginning is modelled on Pindar (01. 2. 1–2), to whom the poem may also in part owe its general
stance of poetic self-consciousness.
20 See Volk 1997: 291–2, with further examples, as well as now Wheeler 1999: 44–8 (though I cannot agree with the authorʼs
contention that the Fasti generally presents itself as written text, in contrast to the supposed oral nature of the
 Metamorphoses). On the importance of ʻoralityʼ for the concept of poetic simultaneity, see below.
21 One of the few examples of a reference to writing in the context of poetic simultaneity is Lucr. 1. 24–6, te [sc. Venerem]
sociam studeo scribendis uersibus esse | quos ego de rerum natura pangere conor I Memmiadae nostro (see Sect. 3.2,
below). Both the gerundive scribendis and the verb conor show that the speaker is only just starting on his poem. Another
instance is Ov. Fast. 1. 93, haec ego cum sumptis agitarem mente tabellis, where the mention of the writing tablets has the
main purpose of evoking the passage in Callimachusʼ Aetia prologue on which this scene is modelled (see Volk 1997: 295–
6). Generally on ʻsingingʼ v. ʻwritingʼ in Greek and esp. Latin poetry, see Lowrie 1997: 55–70 (in the context of a discussion
of Horaceʼs Odes).
22 See Albis 1996: 8–9 on the convention of invoking the Muse(s) at the beginning of a poem: ʻEven much later in the history
of Greek literature, when poetry was no longer orally composed, inspiration was still associated with performance. When a
poet invokes his Muse, he creates the impression that he is just then embarking on the process of composition, since
divine inspiration is conventionally a necessary prerequisite for starting a poemʼ (9).
23 Note that in principle, self-referential statements need not be literally true in the situation of composition-cum-
performance either: even the actually performing poet can create a Active speech situation.
24 Thus, to take a very simple example, Theognis I. 943–4, ἐγγύθεν αὐλητῆρος ἀείσομαι ὧδε καταστὰς ⃒δεξιός ἀθανάτοις
θεοῖσιν ἐπευνχόμενος, which may originally have been an ex tempore composition-cum-performance at a symposium,
can easily be reperformed even by someone standing le of the piper or without musical accompaniment—the listeners
will automatically regard these words as a fiction. See also Nagy 1996: 59–86 on reperformance of the Homeric poems as a
kind of re-enactment in which the rhapsode takes over the role of ʻHomerʼ, i.e., of the poemʼs ʻIʼ.
25 I here ignore the possibility of improvisation during performance, always a given, esp. in less formal settings.
26 On the di erence between the choral ʻIʼ and the poetʼs ʻIʼ, see Lefkowitz 1991: 1–71. Note that texts of this kind exhibit a
rather special kind of poetic self-consciousness not hitherto considered: they explicitly present themselves as poetry, but
the speaker is not the poet, but the performer(s).
27 On the controversy over ʻWho sang Pindarʼs Victory Odes?ʼ, see the (necessarily partial) survey in Lefkowitz 1995. As will
become clear from the following, I am extremely sceptical as to whether this question can be answered on the basis of the
texts.
28 We may compare the use of addresses to the audience; Finnegan 1992: 118 notes that these are rather uncommon in oral
poetry. This might appear surprising, but then, in an oral performance, it is always clear that the poet is performing for an
audience, at which his words are directed. By contrast, the reason why, e.g., didactic poetry typically abounds in direct
addresses to the student(s) (see Sect. 2.2, below) is precisely the fact that the entire teacher-student constellation is a
fiction that is constituted, not reflected, by these repeated addresses.
29 Albis 1996:10; see ch. 1passim. Albis comes close to a treatment of the phenomenon that I call poetic simultaneity (when I
wrote my article on the Fasti, the book was not yet known to me), but, since he focuses exclusively on Apollonius, he does
not take account of the wider implications of his argument. The same is true for Wheeler who, in his narratological study
of the Metamorphoses, observes that ʻOvid presents his poem as a fictive viva-voce perfor manceʼ (1999: 3), apparently
without realizing that many other (esp. epic) poems work along the same lines. Cf. also Pfeij er (1999: 34) who aptly writes
about Pindar that he is ʻat pains to create the illusion that his odes take shape at the very spot, fictionally representing the
process of compositionʼ.
30 The etymology of οἴμη is unclear, but it appears reasonable to connect it with οἶμος ʻpathʼ (itself of obscure etymology),
which is first used metapoetically in Hymn. Hom. Merc. 451 (οἶμος ἀοιδῆς); see Chantraine 1968–80 and Frisk 1960–72 s.vv.
οἴμη and οἶμος.
31 In addition to Becker 1937 and Durante 1958, see now esp. Asper 1997: 21–107 (with special focus on Callimachus) and the
comprehensive treatment of Nünlist 1998: 228–83. See in addition Giannisi 1997 for the idea of ʻspeech as progressʼ in
Greek culture; Kuhlmann 1906: 20–2 and 24 6 for a collection of Greek passages; Ford 1992: 40–8 on the ʻtopical poeticsʼ of
Homer; Steiner 1986: 76–86 on the path metaphor in Pindar; Wimmel 1960: 103–11 on the ʻSymbolgruppen des Wegesʼ in
Callimachus and his Roman followers; Norden 1891: 274–6 specifically on the chariot metaphor; and Lieberg 1969 and
Curtius 1948: 136–8 on seafaring imagery.
32 On these Ovidian passages, see also the discussion below in Sect. 5.2.
33 It is interesting to note that in order to deliver long speeches without written notes, orators used a memorization
technique that itself involved a mental movement through space (see Yates 1966: 1–26; Giannisi 1997: 139 and n. 20). As
discussed, e.g., by Quintilian (Inst. 11. 2. 17–22), the speaker would in his imagination place the single details he wished to
remember in certain places, e.g., inside a familiar house. In order to recall them in order, he would then have to ʻwalkʼ
through this imagined location and ʻpick them upʼ. Thus, to quote Frances Yates,ʼ ʻ[w]e have to think of the ancient orator
as moving in imagination through his memory building whilst he is making his speech, drawing from the memorised
places the images he has placed on themʼ (1966: 3).
34 See Fuhrmann 1960: 28, 57, 69, 77–8, 97–8, 120–1, 142 and n. 2, and index s.v. ʻÜberleitungsformelnʼ.
35 See Durante 1958: 3–4; Becker 1937: 101–16 (on the ʻWeg des λόγοςʼ in Herodotus). Compare in English the use of dead
metaphors like ʻcome toʼ, ʻgo overʼ, ʻleave asideʼ, etc. to refer to speech.
36 See Norden 1891: 274–5 (chariot) and Curtius 1948: 137 (ship).
1 For my use of the word poetry, see the Introduction, above. Note that in the following survey of theoretical approaches to
defining poetry, ʻpoetryʼ could o en, and will sometimes, be glossed with ʻliteratureʼ, in the sense in which the term is
used in modern philologies: ʻEnglish literatureʼ means ʻEnglish novels, poems, plays, etc.ʼ, i.e., it refers to fictional writing;
to the classicist, by contrast, any kind of written discourse usually qualifies as ʻliteratureʼ. When it comes to ancient texts,
ʻliteratureʼ in the narrower sense is almost exclusively restricted to ʻpoetryʼ (discourse in verse), except for some
comparatively late genres, such as the novel. Critics who have developed their theories apropos of modern forms of
 writing tend to speak of ʻliteratureʼ, but I believe that their approaches can be applied to ancient ʻpoetryʼ, as well. Note that
I have outlined some of the ideas developed in this chapter already in my article on Ovidʼs Fasti (Volk 1997), to which I
shall from time to time refer.
2 For the following discussion, see esp. Guller 1997: 18–42; see also Dalzell 1996: 12–18, esp. 17–18 and Dover 1997: 182–3,
as well as the papers in Hernadi (ed.) 1978.
3 For a useful, though fiercely polemical, survey of structuralist theories of poetic language, see Pratt 1977: 3–37.
4 It must be stressed that this ʻothernessʼ of poetry is not a concept unique to modern aesthetics, where a poem is viewed as
an autonomous piece of art, but that it is characteristic also, and especially, of traditional and oral cultures. Compare the
comments of Ruth Finnegan, who notes apropos of oral poetry that typically a ʻpoem is, as it were, italicised, set apart
from everyday life and languageʼ (1992: 25–8, at 25), and of Calvert Watkins (1995:183), who in treating Indo-European
poetics remarks that the ʻtotal e ect of all forms of poetic technique is going to be a distancing of the poetic message from
ordinary human languageʼ (here Watkins explicitly follows the Jakobsonian model).
5 A note on terminology: I use ʻself-consciousʼ to refer to poetry that explicitly identifies itself as poetry (as discussed in
detail in the course of this chapter); a self-conscious poem is one that shows itself, as it were, ʻawareʼ of its own being
poetry. By contrast, I employ ʻmeta-poeticʼ to describe any poetic utterance that I understand as making explicit or
implicit reference to poetry, either to the particular poem or to poetry in general (thus, e.g., the Callimachean dictum oὺδέ
κελεύθῳ |χαίρω, τίς πολλούς ᾧδε καὶ ᾧδε Φέρει (Epigr. 28. 1–2) can be taken as metapoetic, i.e., as implicitly making a
comment about poetry). Finally, ʻself-referentialʼ denotes, not surprisingly, any utterance that refers to itself. Self-
referentiality is not restricted to poetry, of course (neither, in fact, is self-consciousness; see below in the text), witness,
e.g., the phrase ʻI now come to the endʼ in speeches. There are obviously areas where ʻself-consciousʼ, ʻmetapoeticʼ, and
ʻself-referentialʼ overlap, and other scholars may employ these terms somewhat di erently from the way I do, but I hope
that my usage will be clear.
6 Note that lack of poetic self-consciousness does not mean lack of metapoetic potential (for the di erence between self-
conscious and metapoetic, see n. 5, above): there are many ways in which poems that do not explicitly present
themselves as poetry can still be under stood as implicitly commenting on their own being poetry and on poetry in
general. Propertius I.I, for example, can be read as programmatic in terms of the speakerʼs role as not only an elegiac lover,
but also an elegiac poet: it is a rule of the genre of love elegy that being a lover and being an elegist are presented as being
just two aspects of the same way of life. Other methods of covert metapoetic reflection cannot be discussed here; as is
well known, the phenomenon has been a popular topic in recent classical scholarship.
7 Unlike some scholars, I will not use the term ʻnarratorʼ to refer to the speakers of the didactic poems I treat since I do not
believe that these texts as wholes (as opposed to some of their parts, such as longer mythological digressions) can be
classed as narratives. A narrative is typically the treatment of ʻa chronological series of events caused or experienced by
characters in a fictional worldʼ (thus the definition in De Jong 1987 (glossary) of what narratologists refer to as the fabula),
a description that does not apply to didactic poetry.
8 For a survey of the history and fortune of the literary persona, see Elliott 1982; see also Clay 1998b: 13–16 on the discovery
of the persona in classical scholarship.
9 For the ancientsʼ awareness (or, for the most part, lack thereof) of what we call the literary persona, see Clay 1998b.
a a
10 PI. Resp. 3.392c9–394c8; Arist. Poet. 1448 20–4, 1460 5–11. Note Platoʼs very clear assessment of Il. 1–14: λέγει … αὐτòς ὁ
:
ποιητής καὶ οὐδέ ἐπιχειρέῖ ἡμῶν τὴν διάνοιαν ἄλλοσε τρέπειν, ώς άλλος τ ι ς ὁ λέγων ἢ αὐτός (393a6–7)·Cf. Clay 1998b
23–8.
11 Of earlier didactic poets, Nicander names himself at Ther. 957 and Alex. 629, while both Empedocles and Aratus may be
hiding their names in puns (see Obbink 1993: 87–8 and n. 93 and Bing 1990).
12 By extension, even in the case of poems that are not self-conscious, readers have a tendency to automatically identify the
persona with the author, unless there is a clear indication that the speaker is someone else.
13 Note that while I use persona for the intra-textual character and author for the extra- textual historical figure, the term
poet applies to both—even though I shall mostly employ it to denote the persona in his role as (purported) creator of the
text.
14 See De Jong 1987 on narrators and focalizers in the Iliad. The distinction between instances where the narratorʼs
perspective, reactions, and opinions colour the narrative and those ʻself-consciousʼ moments where he steps forward and
identifies himself as the narrator/poet is very important and not always clearly drawn by scholars.
15 Cf. Pfeij er 1999: 33–43, specifically on Pindar.
16 The Homenc Hymns probably functioned as real beginnings, or ʻproemsʼ, in the performance of epic: they were the singersʼ
more personal introductions that preceded the performance of the epic poems proper (see, e.g., Ford 1992: 23–31). Note
that elsewhere in this book I use the word ʻproemʼ more generally to refer to any kind of introduction to a poem.
17 See Conte 1992: 147 on the liminal status of the proem: ʻAt the border between fully poetic speech and speech still outside
of poetry, the proem—the preliminary announcement of a poem which follows—is already song and not yet song.ʼ
18 On proems in the middle as a typical place for metapoetic reflection in Alexandrian and Roman poetry, see Conte 1992.
19 As is well known, this beginning is modelled on Pindar (01. 2. 1–2), to whom the poem may also in part owe its general
stance of poetic self-consciousness.
20 See Volk 1997: 291–2, with further examples, as well as now Wheeler 1999: 44–8 (though I cannot agree with the authorʼs
contention that the Fasti generally presents itself as written text, in contrast to the supposed oral nature of the
Metamorphoses). On the importance of ʻoralityʼ for the concept of poetic simultaneity, see below.
21 One of the few examples of a reference to writing in the context of poetic simultaneity is Lucr. 1. 24–6, te [sc. Venerem]
sociam studeo scribendis uersibus esse | quos ego de rerum natura pangere conor I Memmiadae nostro (see Sect. 3.2,
below). Both the gerundive scribendis and the verb conor show that the speaker is only just starting on his poem. Another
 instance is Ov. Fast. 1. 93, haec ego cum sumptis agitarem mente tabellis, where the mention of the writing tablets has the
main purpose of evoking the passage in Callimachusʼ Aetia prologue on which this scene is modelled (see Volk 1997: 295–
6). Generally on ʻsingingʼ v. ʻwritingʼ in Greek and esp. Latin poetry, see Lowrie 1997: 55–70 (in the context of a discussion
of Horaceʼs Odes).
22 See Albis 1996: 8–9 on the convention of invoking the Muse(s) at the beginning of a poem: ʻEven much later in the history
of Greek literature, when poetry was no longer orally composed, inspiration was still associated with performance. When a
poet invokes his Muse, he creates the impression that he is just then embarking on the process of composition, since
divine inspiration is conventionally a necessary prerequisite for starting a poemʼ (9).
23 Note that in principle, self-referential statements need not be literally true in the situation of composition-cum-
performance either: even the actually performing poet can create a Active speech situation.
24 Thus, to take a very simple example, Theognis I. 943–4, ἐγγύθεν αὐλητῆρος ἀείσομαι ὧδε καταστὰς ⃒δεξιός ἀθανάτοις
θεοῖσιν ἐπευνχόμενος, which may originally have been an ex tempore composition-cum-performance at a symposium,
can easily be reperformed even by someone standing le of the piper or without musical accompaniment—the listeners
will automatically regard these words as a fiction. See also Nagy 1996: 59–86 on reperformance of the Homeric poems as a
kind of re-enactment in which the rhapsode takes over the role of ʻHomerʼ, i.e., of the poemʼs ʻIʼ.
25 I here ignore the possibility of improvisation during performance, always a given, esp. in less formal settings.
26 On the di erence between the choral ʻIʼ and the poetʼs ʻIʼ, see Lefkowitz 1991: 1–71. Note that texts of this kind exhibit a
rather special kind of poetic self-consciousness not hitherto considered: they explicitly present themselves as poetry, but
the speaker is not the poet, but the performer(s).
27 On the controversy over ʻWho sang Pindarʼs Victory Odes?ʼ, see the (necessarily partial) survey in Lefkowitz 1995. As will
become clear from the following, I am extremely sceptical as to whether this question can be answered on the basis of the
texts.
28 We may compare the use of addresses to the audience; Finnegan 1992: 118 notes that these are rather uncommon in oral
poetry. This might appear surprising, but then, in an oral performance, it is always clear that the poet is performing for an
audience, at which his words are directed. By contrast, the reason why, e.g., didactic poetry typically abounds in direct
addresses to the student(s) (see Sect. 2.2, below) is precisely the fact that the entire teacher-student constellation is a
fiction that is constituted, not reflected, by these repeated addresses.
29 Albis 1996:10; see ch. 1 passim. Albis comes close to a treatment of the phenomenon that I call poetic simultaneity (when
I wrote my article on the Fasti, the book was not yet known to me), but, since he focuses exclusively on Apollonius, he
does not take account of the wider implications of his argument. The same is true for Wheeler who, in his narratological
study of the Metamorphoses, observes that ʻOvid presents his poem as a fictive viva-voce perfor manceʼ (1999: 3),
apparently without realizing that many other (esp. epic) poems work along the same lines. Cf. also Pfeij er (1999: 34) who
aptly writes about Pindar that he is ʻat pains to create the illusion that his odes take shape at the very spot, fictionally
representing the process of compositionʼ.
30 The etymology of οἴμη is unclear, but it appears reasonable to connect it with οἶμος ʻpathʼ (itself of obscure etymology),
which is first used metapoetically in Hymn. Hom. Merc. 451 (οἶμος ἀοιδῆς); see Chantraine 1968–80 and Frisk 1960–72 s.vv.
οἴμη and οἶμος.
31 In addition to Becker 1937 and Durante 1958, see now esp. Asper 1997: 21–107 (with special focus on Callimachus) and the
comprehensive treatment of Nünlist 1998: 228–83. See in addition Giannisi 1997 for the idea of ʻspeech as progressʼ in
Greek culture; Kuhlmann 1906: 20–2 and 24 6 for a collection of Greek passages; Ford 1992: 40–8 on the ʻtopical poeticsʼ of
Homer; Steiner 1986: 76–86 on the path metaphor in Pindar; Wimmel 1960: 103–11 on the ʻSymbolgruppen des Wegesʼ in
Callimachus and his Roman followers; Norden 1891: 274–6 specifically on the chariot metaphor; and Lieberg 1969 and
Curtius 1948: 136–8 on seafaring imagery.
32 On these Ovidian passages, see also the discussion below in Sect. 5.2.
33 It is interesting to note that in order to deliver long speeches without written notes, orators used a memorization
technique that itself involved a mental movement through space (see Yates 1966: 1–26; Giannisi 1997: 139 and n. 20). As
discussed, e.g., by Quintilian (Inst. 11. 2. 17–22), the speaker would in his imagination place the single details he wished to
remember in certain places, e.g., inside a familiar house. In order to recall them in order, he would then have to ʻwalkʼ
through this imagined location and ʻpick them upʼ. Thus, to quote Frances Yates,ʼ ʻ[w]e have to think of the ancient orator
as moving in imagination through his memory building whilst he is making his speech, drawing from the memorised
places the images he has placed on themʼ (1966: 3).
34 See Fuhrmann 1960: 28, 57, 69, 77–8, 97–8, 120–1, 142 and n. 2, and index s.v. ʻÜberleitungsformelnʼ.
35 See Durante 1958: 3–4; Becker 1937: 101–16 (on the ʻWeg des λόγοςʼ in Herodotus). Compare in English the use of dead
metaphors like ʻcome toʼ, ʻgo overʼ, ʻleave asideʼ, etc. to refer to speech.
36 See Norden 1891: 274–5 (chariot) and Curtius 1948: 137 (ship).
 The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius
Katharina Volk

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245505.001.0001
Published: 2002 Online ISBN: 9780191714986 Print ISBN: 9780199245505

CHAPTER

2 ‘Improbable Art’: The Theory and Practice of Ancient

Didactic Poetry 
KATHARINA VOLK

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245505.003.0003 Pages 25–68

Published: June 2002

Abstract
This chapter opens with a survey of the few known ancient theoretical approaches to didactic poetry,
including Aristotle's verdict that poetry like that of the philosopher Empedocles was not ‘mimetic’ and
the view, found in the grammarian Diomedes, that the genre belongs to a type of poetry in which ‘the
poet himself speaks’ (i.e. not characters). It then moves on to a new de nition which identi es the
following four criteria for the genre: poetic intent, teacher-student constellation, poetic self-
consciousness, and poetic simultaneity. After tracing the development of didactic poetry from its
founder Hesiod to Lucretius, the chapter concludes by considering whether Romans of the 1st century
BC had an awareness of a genre ‘didactic poetry’, tentatively answering the question in the a rmative.

Keywords: Aristotle, poetic intent, didactic poetry, Diomedes, Hesiod, poetic self-consciousness, poetic
simultaneity, teacher-student constellation Aristotle, poetic intent, didactic poetry, Diomedes, Hesiod,
poetic self-consciousness, poetic simultaneity, teacher-student constellation Aristotle, poetic intent,
didactic poetry, Diomedes, Hesiod, poetic self-consciousness, poetic simultaneity, teacher-student
constellation
Subject: Classical Poetry

nam quam uaria sint genera poematorum, Baebi,

quamque longe distincta alia ab aliis, nosce.

Accius, Didascalica

ἀλλὰ τορῶς ταῦτ’ ἴσθι, θєοῦ πάρα μῦθον ἀκούσας.

Empedocles, On Mature

The previous chapter treated a number of questions of general poetics that will be central to my discussion
of the individual didactic poems in the later parts of this book. However, before the theoretical insights on
the workings of self-conscious poetry can be applied to the interpretation of single texts, another
preliminary question remains to be considered. Given that the topic of the book is the poetics of Latin
didactic poetry, it seems reasonable to determine beforehand what didactic poetry is and how it is to be
de ned for the present purpose. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Trying to de ne didactic poetry
takes us into the wild and dangerous territory of genre criticism, on a journey that is long and di cult, not
only because the generic status of didactic was and is controversial, but also because it is not at all clear
what we ought to understand by genre in the rst place.

1
Genre appears to be a kind of necessary evil of literary criticism, classical scholarship included. It is an
immensely useful concept, employed widely by scholars as a way of di erentiating among types of
 literature, that is, of understanding what connects, or distinguishes, individual texts. However, it is di cult
to describe in theoretical terms what genre is, and it is next to impossible, on a more practical level, to draw
up a comprehensive list of genres, de ne them, and distribute given pieces of literature among them. Even if
p. 26 such an experiment were restricted only to a very limited period of literary history, it is unlikely that any
two scholars would agree on the exact distribution, let alone the de nitions of individual genres. What they
would all agree on, however, is that there is such a thing as genre and that it plays an important role in the
production and reception of literature.

One of the main problems with genre is that ‘built into its ways of working are di culties that have
ultimately to do with a version of the hermeneutic circle: how can we choose speci c works from which to
draw a de nition of, say, epic … unless we already know what an epic is?’ (Garber, Orsini, and Brogan
1993:456). It is therefore inevitable that my discussion of the genre of ancient didactic poetry should
describe a similar circular movement: the following observations that lead to a de nition of didactic poetry
would not be possible if I did not already believe that there was such a thing as the didactic genre and that it
comprised a certain corpus of texts with certain characteristics. Additionally, since it seems impossible to
de ne the didactic genre without rst deciding what a genre is, I shall in the following also provide at least a
working de nition of genre; however, I would hardly be able to do so if I did not already have some concept
of genre—which in turn is inevitably in uenced by my thoughts about the speci c genre in question, that is,
didactic poetry. In the course of this chapter—in which I move from ancient views of didactic poetry and of
genre in general (Sect. 2.1) to my de nition of didactic poetry and of genre in general (Sect. 2.2), in order to
then look at the historical development of the didactic genre (Sect. 2.3) and, nally, enquire into the way in
which didactic poetry might have been perceived by poets and readers in the rst century BC/early rst
century AD (Sect. 2.4)—I shall, by necessity, occupy various positions in the Hermeneutic Circle, in the hope
that this procedure will ultimately lead to an increase of insight, instead of turning into a circulus vitiosus.

2.1. Ancient Views of Didactic Poetry

Starting from the assumption, shared by the majority of classicists, that there are literary genres and that
2
p. 27 Greek and Latin didactic poetry (that is, a certain body of texts ) constitutes one of them, it seems a
reasonable approach for a historically minded scholar to ask what the Greeks and Romans themselves had
to say about this particular category. In order to arrive at an answer to this question, however, it is rst
necessary to enquire brie y into ancient views of genre in general since any given de nition of didactic
poetry can be understood only in the context of the more universal ideas of types of literature that underlie
3
it. Now, ancient ideas of genre are no more uni ed than their modern counterparts. For the most part, the
Greeks and Romans, like many scholars today, appear to have regarded the distribution of individual
literary texts among various categories more as a convenience than as a phenomenon worthy of theoretical
4
investigation. Thus, many writers throughout antiquity operate with such generic terms as epic, elegy, and
tragedy in the same way that modern classicists do, that is, without re ecting overly much on the exact
de nitions of these categories. If these ‘common sense’ poetic genres are de ned at all, it is rst and
foremost by their metres: thus, epic is written in hexameters, elegy in elegiacs, tragedy (mostly) in
5
trimeters, and so on. A second common criterion is content: epic, for example, is typically regarded as
dealing with heroes and gods, ‘kings and battles’. And third, a genre typically has a founder, a primus
inuentor, who becomes the model imitated, and often explicitly invoked, by his successors (see Rosenmeyer
1985: 81–2). A nice combination of all three criteria is found in Horace’s little overview of genres and their
metres in Ars poetica 73–85; to demonstrate this, I quote just the rst two lines, on epic (73-4):

p. 28 res gestae regumque ducumque et tristia bella [content]

quo scribi possent numero [metre], monstrauit Homerus [founder].

6
(Homer showed in what metre the deeds of kings and generals and grim wars might be treated.)

This approach to de ning poetic genres was certainly the most common way of conceiving of di erent
7
kinds of texts in antiquity. However, it was not the only one. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Plato and Aristotle
famously distinguished three types of poetry: one where the poet himself speaks (exempli ed by Plato, to
the consternation of modern scholars, with the obscure genre of the dithyramb), a second where individual
8
characters speak (as in tragedy and comedy), and a third, mixed, type (epic of the Homeric kind). This
division of poetry according to the ‘situation of enunciation’ (‘situation d’énonciation’, thus Genette 1977:
 394 and passim), though hardly mainstream at its time, was extremely in uential in the subsequent history
of Western poetics and came, mistakenly, to be regarded as the origin of the triad ‘lyric-epic-dramatic’
9
familiar from Romantic and modern literary theory. It is important to understand, though, that, as Gérard
Genette has shown, Plato’s and Aristotle’s idiosyncratic approach was by no means aimed at abolishing
p. 29 traditional concepts of genre, but rather accommodated them. Established genres such as tragedy, epic, or
dithyramb t more or less neatly into the new system of poetic ‘modes’ (Genette’s term) and both
thinkers recurred to them to illustrate their points: thus, the genre of tragedy, for example, was one
example of the ‘dramatic mode’ (in which characters speak), but the genre and the mode were by no means
10
identical or de ned by the same criteria.

The di erence between the communis opinio about genre and the methods of distinguishing di erent types
of poetry employed by such theorists as Plato and Aristotle is re ected also in the Greeks’ and Romans’
11
diverse ways of viewing didactic poetry. For the most part, such poems as the Works and Days, the
Phaenomena, the De rerum natura, and the Georgics were not in fact regarded as belonging to a distinct genre.
Thus, Wilhelm Kroll rightly observed at the beginning of his Pauly-Wissowa entry on didactic poetry, ‘[v]on
vornherein sei festgestellt, daβ für die Alten das L[ehrgedicht] eine eigene Gattung nicht bildet; für sie sind
die meisten L[ehrgedichte] einfach ἔπη’ (1925: 1842). This general failure to recognize a genre of didactic is
obviously in keeping with the widely held view, discussed above, that genres are distinguished in the rst
place by their metres. Since they were mostly composed in hexameters, the texts that we call didactic were
in antiquity usually regarded as epic. Quintilian (Inst. 10.1.46-57), for example, lists Hesiod, Aratus, and
Nicander together with Homer, Antimachus, Panyassis, Apollonius, Theocritus, Pisander, and Euphorion, a
group labelled epici (51); in the discussion of Roman poets, Lucretius (10. 1. 87) appears in the same category
12
as Vergil (85–6) and Ennius (88). Apart from very few, and late, examples (see below), there is no evidence
that the Greeks and Romans singled out the didactic poets as a speci c subgroup, either of epic or of poetry
in general.

If thus from the point of view of what I have called the common-sense genre theory of antiquity, didactic
poetry was not a genre, it fared even worse at the hands of a somewhat more discerning critic, namely
p. 30 Aristotle. In contrast to οἱ ἄνθρωποι, who thought that poetry could be satisfactorily de ned by its metre
b
(Poet. 1447 13-17; see the discussion in Chapter 1, above), Aristotle realized that Empedocles’ poetry and
that of Homer (both wrote in hexameters and therefore were, by common-sense nomenclature, ἐποποιοί) did
13
not really have very much in common, in fact, nothing at all, except for the hexameter. According to
Aristotle, however, verse itself was not enough to make a text poetry; to him the criterion of poetry was
mimesis, and unlike Homer, Empedocles crucially failed on this account. Since his work was not mimetic, he
b 14
was, in Aristotle’s opinion, to be called a ϕυσιολόγος rather than a ποιητής (Poet. 1447 19-2 0).

This Aristotelian verdict is usually quoted as the rst recognition, however negative, of didactic poetry as a
genre. However, it is important to note that Aristotle himself had no interest in distinguishing didactic from
other types of poetry, or from epic speci cally. His aim was to distinguish poetry, which included epic, from
non-poetry, which happened to include what we call didactic, but which, in the context of the Poetics at least,
was not only of no speci c interest to Aristotle, but, in fact, decidedly a non-topic. Thus, our investigation
of ancient views of didactic poetry has so far yielded the paradoxical result that, while the poems that we call
didactic did for the most part not attain the status of a distinct genre and were lumped together with other
hexameter texts under the rubric of epic, as soon as someone recognized their di erence, they were
demoted from the status of poetry and excluded from the study of poetics altogether. This dilemma, while
apparently of little concern to the actual poets (didactic poetry ourished long after Aristotle), was clearly
worrisome from a theoretical point of view, and for centuries to come, critics tried to solve this vexing
15
‘Problem der Poetik’ and to determine the exact status of didactic poetry.

Two main approaches to the problem are known from antiquity. Both o er a positive theory of didactic
poetry as a kind οι poetry (contra Aristotle) that is distinct from other types of poetry (contra the communis
opinio). Both are to a certain extent similar, both were highly in uential in the subsequent history of the
p. 31 question, and both are rather di cult to date. The rst is found in the so-called Tractatus Coislinianus, a
tenth-century manuscript that contains an epitome of a Peripatetic work of literary criticism and deals
mainly with comedy. The unknown author surreptitiously reverses Aristotle’s verdict that, say, such
‘physiological’ works as that of Empedocles do not qualify as poetry; he does this, not by claiming that,
somehow, such texts fall under the category of mimesis after all, but by simply and daringly positing a
16
second type of poetry, one that is ‘non-mimetic’ (ἀμίμητος), next to the ‘mimetic’ (μιμητή ) one known from
the Poetics (CGF50 Kaibel). Mimetic poetry comprises narrative and drama; the non-mimetic kind is split
 17
into ἱστορική and παιδευτική, and the latter is further divided into ὑϕηγητική and θεωρητική. Thus, didactic poetry
makes what is presumably its rst appearance in literary criticism under the name ποίησις παιδευτική in this
elegant, albeit somewhat subversive, attempt to solve the problem posed by Aristotle’s one-sided de nition
of poetry. Note that in this schema, didactic and its supposedly closest relative, epic, belong to wholly
di erent categories, for epic is clearly a representative of the narrative subgroup (τò … ἀπαγγελτικόν) of
mimetic, as opposed to non-mimetic, poetry.

A second way of integrating didactic poetry as a distinct genre into a system of poetic types is found most
prominently in the Ars grammatica of Diomedes (4th/5th cent. AD). While the Tractatus Coislinianus stands in
the Aristotelian tradition, Diomedes takes up the originally Platonic tripartite division of poetic ‘modes’
(see above) and distinguishes three poematos genera (Gramm. Lat. 1. 482. 14 Keil) according to the mode of
enunciation: the rst is the dramaticon … uel actiuum in quo personae agunt solae sine ullius poetae
interlocutione (17–18); the second is the exegeticon … uel enarratiuum in quo poeta ipse loquitur sine ullius
personae interlocutione (20-1); not surprisingly, the third is the mixed type (κοινόν … uel commune; 23). While
the latter comprises epic and lyric, and the dramatic type includes tragedy, comedy, satyr play, and mime,
the narrative type is further divided into three subgroups, angeltice, historice, and, nally, didascalice (31-2).
This last category is described as follows:

p. 32 didascalice est qua conprehenditur philosophia Empedoclis et Lucreti, item astrologia, ut phaenomena
Aratu et Ciceronis, et georgica Vergilii et his similia. (483. 1–3)

(Didactic poetry is the one under which is comprised the philosophy of Empedocles and Lucretius, likewise
astronomy, such as the Phaenomena of Aratus and Cicero, and Vergil’s Georgics, and things like this.)

This list, though not comprehensive, comes fairly close to what modern classicists would include in a survey
of ancient didactic poetry. In Diomedes ’ theory, too, epic and didactic are regarded as two wholly di erent
types of poetry.

The integration of didactic poetry into these two poetic systems must have been motivated by the
realization that there was such a distinct kind of poetic texts that needed to be taken account of, pace
Aristotle (and notwithstanding the indi erence of earlier critics). While the Tractatus Coislinianus reacts to
Aristotle directly, Diomedes circumvents the problem by taking recourse to the earlier, Platonic, division of
poetry; both approaches inventively develop the theories of the two great thinkers in order to accommodate
the various genres as they manifest themselves in poetic practice. What remains unclear is the date of these
two instances of ancient genre criticism. The Tractatus Coislinianus is usually thought to be based on a
Peripatetic treatise of the Hellenistic era, although its author could be as early as Theophrastus or as late as
18
Andronicus of Rhodes (1st cent, BC). Richard Janko (1984: esp. 52–90) has even boldly claimed that the
19
p. 33 underlying text is none other than Aristotle’s lost second book of the Poetics, but this appears unlikely.
As for Diomedes, he is the rst surviving author who explicitly makes didactic poetry as a genre an example
of the kind of poetry ‘in which the poet himself speaks’; however, the Platonic theory of the three τύποι λέξєως
is so common in both Greek and Latin literary criticism that it seems unlikely that it should have been
20
applied to didactic poetry only in late antiquity. Egert Pöhlmann, following Hellfried Dahlmann, places the
origin of Diomedes’ view of didactic poetry in (early) Hellenistic times, a period that did, after all, see a
21
renaissance of didactic poetry, especially in the works of Aratus and Nicander (see Sect. 2.3, below). It is
thus possible, though not assured, that by the time of the authors who are the principal subject of this book,
there already existed a positive theory of didactic as a distinct genre of poetry.

On the whole, it seems that the story of the changing critical attitudes to didactic poetry in antiquity (and
22
beyond ) is of greater interest to the historian of poetics than to the literary critic who attempts, as I do in
this book, to understand the workings of Greek and Latin didactic poetry as an actual genre. There is no
indication that any of the theories discussed had an impact on the practice of the authors who composed
didactic poetry (an observation that probably holds true for literary theory and practice in general). It is
often stated that Aristotle’s verdict did not prevent didactic poetry from being composed or from being
regarded as poetry by its authors and its audience (see, e.g., Dalzell 1996: 18–19)—quite the contrary, as I
23
p. 34 hope to show. Likewise, there is no reason to believe that any known didactic poet was aware, or would
have cared, that he was a practitioner of a ‘non-mimetic’ genre. Even the common-sense theoretical view
of didactic poetry cannot have been too in uential on actual poetic practice: after all, most didactic poems
are quite unlike epic.
 If the (admittedly rather few) known approaches to didactic poetry in antiquity fail to throw light on the
poets’ motivation, they also do not contribute much to the description and de nition of the didactic genre,
which, after all, is the goal of this chapter. We have learned so far that didactic poetry is somehow like epic,
presumably mostly as regards its metre, but that, unlike epic, it is not mimetic in the Aristotelian sense.
Furthermore, it is a kind of poetry in which ‘the poet himself speaks’, without interference from other
characters. This is more or less all that we can glean from the ancient critics, and it is clearly unsatisfactory.
It is thus time to turn away from theory and toward the poems themselves and to try to understand the
genre of didactic poetry on the basis of the actual texts that constitute it.

2.2. Didactic Poetry as a Genre

Since in the following I shall attempt to arrive at my own de nition of the genre of didactic poetry, it seems
appropriate rst to comment brie y on my own use and understanding of the term genre. In the context of
the discussion at hand, my concept of genre is largely heuristic. With hindsight, that is, many centuries after
the fact, I perceive that during a certain period of literary history (Greek and Roman antiquity) a certain
major body of texts exhibits a certain number of shared characteristics that distinguish it from other texts
and that these similarities do not appear to have come about by chance, but must to a certain extent be
24
assumed to have been intended by the authors and noticed by their audience. To say that these texts
belong to the same genre is nothing more than a convenient shorthand to describe the phenomenon. This
p. 35 empirical approach to genre appears to me the most fruitful and secure, even though it may be criticized
as anachronistic since, strictly speaking, by this understanding a genre can be fully recognized only in
hindsight. To quote Genette, ‘toutes les espèces, tous les sous-genres, genres ou super-genres sont des
classes empiriques, établies par observation du donné historique’ (1977: 419). It is thus not necessarily the
case that the genres established by literary historians were perceived in exactly the same way by their
practitioners at the time, especially not in those cases where a new genre was just being established, a
process that may not have been obvious to those involved in it. The question of how authors and their
contemporary audiences conceive of speci c genres and genre in general is a question that is as interesting
as it is di cult. I shall return to it at the end of this chapter, after rst determining the characteristics of the
genre of didactic poetry with the help of the empirical method just described and tracing its historical
development.

Despite the fact that the ancients, as we have seen, mostly viewed didactic poetry as belonging to epic, it
seems to me reasonable to regard it (more or less anachronistically) as its own genre and not, as some
classicists are inclined to do, as a mere subgenre. According to the de nition of Alastair Fowler, ‘ [i] n
subgenre we nd the same external characteristics with the corresponding kind [‘kind’ is Fowler’s term for
what I would simply call ‘genre’] together with additional speci cation of content’ (1982: 56). Thus, if the
novel constitutes a genre, the historical novel is one of its subgenres. Even though classicists sometimes
25
speak of ‘didactic epic’, Greek and Latin didactic poetry clearly does not qualify as a subgenre according to
this de nition. Vis-à-vis epic, the content of didactic poetry is not ‘additionally speci ed’, but usually
wholly di erent. In fact, apart from the metre (though note exceptions like Ovid’s Ars amatoria, in elegiacs)
and, as a consequence, often a somewhat ‘epic’ diction and ‘high’ style, didactic poetry has generally very
26
little in common with epic. It thus seems reasonable to me, as it did earlier to Diomedes and the
anonymous Peripatetic critic epitomized in the Tractatus Coislinianus, to recognize the sadly neglected
category of didactic poetry as its own poetic genre.

p. 36 In order to do so, it is important to distinguish from didactic poetry proper the notion, widespread in Greek
and Roman culture, that all poetry is, or has the potential to be, didactic (see esp. Lausberg 1990: 192–4).
From the idea of Homer as the ‘teacher of Greece’ (on which compare Verdenius 1970) to Horace’s famous
dictum aut prodesse uolunt aut delectare poetae (Ars P. 333), the view that one can, or ought to be able to, learn
27
from poetry remains commonplace throughout antiquity. However, even if it is true that the Iliad can teach
us about the Trojan War, and perhaps even about the art of generalship, as the rhapsode Ion contends in
Plato’s dialogue (540d1-541d7), this does not make it a didactic poem. Whether one can in fact learn
something—anything—from a text is a useless criterion since by that token, there would be very few, if any,
poems that could not pass as didactic. Still, it is clear that the time-honoured concept of the poet as teacher
plays an important role in didactic poetry, being regularly exploited in the poems themselves and possibly
lying behind the obscure origins of the genre as a whole.
 To turn now to the positive characteristics of didactic poetry, it is clear to me that the criteria I shall propose
in the following do not constitute the only possible way of de ning this elusive genre, and that individual
scholars, even ones who share my basic approach, may wish to put individual accents di erently. It is also
obvious that the actual Greek and Latin didactic works ‘adhere’ to my de nition more or less closely; as will
become clear in the following section, didactic poetry is a genre very much in ux and arguably reaches its
‘ideal’ state (that is, ‘ideal’ according to my de nition) only after going through a number of permutations
(see also nn. 33 and 67). Nevertheless, I believe that my de nition captures the essence of both the ‘didactic’
and the ‘poetic’ aspects of didactic poetry and can serve, as I hope to show in the following chapters, as a
useful key to the interpretation of the individual poems.

Of the four central features that in my opinion de ne didactic poetry, the rst is the explicit didactic intent. A
didactic poem either states clearly, or gives other strong indications, that it is rst and foremost supposed
to teach whatever subject or skill it happens to be treating. Thus, while we are free to imagine that Homer
p. 37 really did wish to instruct his audience in strategy, the Iliad itself gives no sign of any such intent. By
contrast, Hesiod’s Works and Days clearly signals its didactic thrust, most prominently in the statement ἐγὼ
δέκє Πέρσῃ ἐτήτυμα μυθησαίμην (IΟ ). Obviously, the didactic intent can be displayed more or less prominently. In
Aratus’ Phaenomena, it is merely—but unmistakably—implied in the speaker’s frequent addresses to his
student. Ovid’s Ars amatoria, by contrast, blatantly advertises its didactic potential already in the very rst
distich:

si quis in hoc artem populo non nouit amandi

hoc legat et lecto carmine doctus amet.

(1. 1–2)

(If anyone in this people does not know the art of love, let him read this and, having read the poem, love as
an expert [lit. as one who has been taught].)

It is important to note that the displayed didactic intent is not in the rst place that of the actual author who
wishes to instruct his audience—an intention that may underlie many works of poetry and that need not be
made explicit (it is reasonable to state that, say, the Theogony teaches us the genealogies of the gods, even
though it does not claim to be doing so, which is one of the reasons why it does not, at least according to my
de nition, qualify as a didactic poem). Rather, the poem’s didactic intent is part of what might be called a
little intra-textual drama, in which the speaker of the text teaches a student or students by means of the
poem itself. This teacher—student constellation is the second de ning characteristic of didactic poetry and
one that has traditionally received much scholarly attention (see esp. the papers in Schiesaro, Mitsis, and
Clay (eds.) 1993). It was observed already by Servius, apropos of Vergil’s Georgics. His remark (which I left
out of my previous survey since it is not in the rst place concerned with genre criticism as such) is easily
the most insightful statement about didactic poetry to have survived from antiquity:

hi libri didascalici sunt, unde necesse est, ut ad aliquem scribantur; nam praeceptum et doctoris et
discipuli personam requirit. unde ad Maecenatem scribit [sc. Vergilius], sicut Hesiodus ad Persen,
Lucretius ad Memmium. (Praef. adGeorg. 129. 9–12 Thilo)

(These books are didactic, whence it is necessary for them to be addressed to someone; for instruction calls
p. 38 for the roles of both teacher and student. Thus (Vergil) addresses Maecenas, just as Hesiod Perses and
Lucretius Memmius.)

Servius’ list could easily be extended to include Empedocles and Pausanias; Aratus and his unnamed
student; Nicander and, respectively, Hermesianax (Theriaca) and Protagoras (Alexipharmaca); Ovid and his
28
iuuenes and puellae; and Manilius and his nameless addressee. While the characters of these addressees can
be developed to a greater or lesser degree (thus, we learn a lot about the unpleasant Perses, whereas, for
example, Aratus’ student remains purely generic), the frequent addresses to them are a feature that all
didactic poems share and that is possibly their single most prominent trait.

By regarding the teacher–student constellation as a purely intra-textual phenomenon (cf. also D. Clay 1983
b: 212–16) I do not wish to deny the possibility that characters like Perses, Pausanias, and Memmius existed
and stood in some relationship to the author. I also do not mean to imply that, say, Empedocles or Lucretius
did not actually compose their poems in order to teach, be it their addressees or their wider audience.
 Finally, I do realize that in the larger communication process between actual author and audience, the
gure of the intra-textual addressee or student can play the role of a foil, with whom the readers or
listeners can either identify or from whom they can distance themselves. This use of the addressee as a kind
of dummy gure is extremely interesting, especially in such cases as those of Perses or Memmius, in which
the reader can clearly not (wholly) identify with his or her intra-textual equivalent and has to nd a way to
29
negotiate this relationship. However, the actual intentions of authors (Did Vergil really want to teach
30
farmers?) and reactions of readers (Did people really read the Ars amatoria to learn the art of love?) are
extremely hard to assess and, as mentioned in the Introduction, my focus is instead on the purely intra-
textual aspects of didactic poetry. I shall thus treat the teacher—student constellation in isolation from the
p. 39 author—reader relationship that it may, or may not, mirror, in the belief that this is the only approach
that will yield reliable results and not sway into mere speculation.

While the persona discipuli, to use Servius’ expression, has been a focus of recent work on didactic poetry, the
persona doctoris has been comparatively neglected. This is remarkable since in didactic poetry the speaker is
even more prominent than the addressee. As Diomedes observed, didactic poetry belongs to the kind in quo
poeta ipse loquitur sine ullius personae interlocutione (Gramm. Lat. 1.482. 21 Keil). And not only does the poet
speak himself, but he speaks qua poet and presents what he is saying explicitly as poetry. In other words,
didactic poetry typically exhibits poetic self-consciousness, as discussed in Chapter 1, and often to a very high
degree. This third characteristic of didactic has not usually been remarked upon in scholarship (though see
E e 1977: 21 and n. 32; Myerowitz 1985: 87), and its neglect may be due to modern prejudices against
didactic poetry as unpoetic and to Aristotle’s verdict. It is also a feature that strongly distinguishes didactic
poetry from epic: as mentioned in Chapter 1, epic always exhibits poetic self-consciousness, but the law of
‘epic objectivity’ does not allow wide scope for re ection on the speaker’s role as poet or the poetic nature of
his words; didactic, by contrast, has the possibility to stress the persona’s poetic activity and to re ect at
great length on its own status as poetry. This di erence is easily observed, for example, by takingjust a brief
comparative look at the Aeneid and the Georgics.

Since the poetic self-consciousness of Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, and Manilius will be a main topic of the later
chapters, it remains to be demonstrated only that their Greek predecessors, too, styled themselves as poets
in their didactic works. The Works and Days is somewhat problematic in this respect (see Sect. 2.3, below),
but the Hesiodic persona does invoke the Muses (1–2) and later refers to his profession as a poet (654–62).
Empedocles’ poem, by contrast, abounds in self-conscious references to its being poetry (B3, B4, B23.11,
B35.1𠅃3, B131); Aratus, too, invokes the Muses (16-18), and while Nicander conspicuously fails to do so, he
uses the sphragis of his two extant poems to call himself Ὁμήρєιoς (Ther. 957) and ὑμνοπόλος (Alex. 629).

As poetically self-conscious texts, all didactic poems furthermore exhibit poetic simultaneity, their fourth
and nal central characteristic. They frequently comment on the process of the poet’s ‘singing’, which in
p. 40 their case is at the same time the process of the teacher’s teaching. It is thus often the teacher’s
addresses to the student that create the impression of the poem in progress: didactic poems abound with
phrases of the kind, ‘having sung of x, I shall now tell you y’ While scholars tend to marginalize them as
transitional passages, it is such statements that actually create the framework of a didactic poem and
constitute what has been called the didactic plot. Though not narrative in any real sense, a didactic poem
does to a certain extent tell a story: the story of its own coming into being as a poem, which is at the same
31
time the story of the teacher’s instructing the student. None too surprisingly, didactic poems also favour
the journey imagery evocative of poetic simultaneity, such as the chariot and the ship metaphors.

To sum up: In the scheme that I have been proposing, the genre of ancient didactic poetry is de ned by four
main characteristics: (1) explicit didactic intent; (2) teacher-student constellation; (3) poetic self-
consciousness; and (4) poetic simultaneity. Obviously, the four are closely related. A didactic poem could
thus be described as the self-consciously poetic speech uttered by the persona, who combines the roles of
poet and teacher, explicitly in order to instruct the frequently addressed student in some professed art or
branch of knowledge. While, as Diomedes knew, didactic, unlike say, tragedy or epic, is strictly a kind of
poetry in which only the poet speaks (with some justi cation, Diomedes thus apparently regarded the
second half of Georgics 4 as aberrant (Gramm. Lat. 1. 482. 22 Keil)), it also shows some a nity with both
drama and narrative. Even though the student never says a word (except sometimes in counterargu–ments
anticipated by the speaker, such as Lucr. 1. 803–8, 897– 900; and perhaps 6. 673; and Man. 4. 387–9 and
869–72), his supposed presence adds dramatic immediacy to the text: he is there and could potentially do
something, at least contradict. Likewise, while didactic poetry does not actually tell a story, it conveys a
sense of plot: the audience can follow the development of the teacher’s instructing the student, as well as
 the development of the poem itself. The observation of these features even led Manfred Erren to conclude
that Aristotle had actually been wrong to dismiss didactic poetry as not mimetic: ‘[D]as Lehrgedicht hat eine
mimetische Komponente, die Aristoteles o enbar übersehen hat: Der lehrende Dichter ahmt eine
p. 41 Belehrungstat so, wie sie zwar nicht geschieht, aber geschehen könnte, nur nach, in einer…
Handlungser ndung, in der er die lehrende Anredestruktur des Gedichts begründet’ (1990: 185). Whether
Aristotle would actually have been happy to speak of mimesis in such a case remains unclear, but Erren’s
description certainly captures the most important aspects of the didactic genre.

Apart from the central characteristics just discussed, it seems practical to distinguish, again purely
empirically, between two somewhat di erent types of didactic poetry. This distinction can be found already
in the Tractatus Coislinianus, where the kind of poetry that is παιδєυτική is further divided into ὑϕηγητική and
θєωρητική. The second, ‘theoretical’, kind appears to be didactic poetry that lays out a science or branch of
knowledge, such as the works of Empedocles or Lucretius. By contrast, poems that teach a practical art, such
as the Works and Days, the Georgics, and the Ars amatoria, belong to the ‘instructional’ type. The main formal
di erence between the two is that, for obvious reasons, in instructional didactic poems, the addresses to the
student(s) tend to take the form of actual advice or downright orders, which are understandably rarer in
32
works of the theoretical kind. Thus, the longer rst part of Aratus’ poem (Φαινόμєνα, 1–732), for example,
is a theoretical treatment of the constellations, while the shorter second part (Διοσημίαι, 733–1154) provides
practical instructions in the art of the weather forecast. Tellingly, of the twenty- ve imperatives addressed
to the student, only six occur in the theoretical section (see the list in Bing 1993: 109).

By the de nition expounded above, the following major texts qualify as didactic poems: Hesiod’s Works and
Days, Empedocles’ On Nature, Aratus’ Phaenomena, Nicander’s Theriaca and Alexipharmaca, Lucretius’ De
rerum natura, Vergil’s Georgics, Ovid’s Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris (and, as far as we can tell from the
fragment we possess, the Medicamina faciei femineae), and Manilius’ Astronomica, as well as numerous other
works in the same tradition from the late rst century BC onward. One poem that is usually regarded as
didactic does not t the bill, namely that of Parmenides, as will be discussed in greater detail in the
p. 42 historical survey in Section 2.3. Likewise, a number of other works that are sometimes considered
33
didactic poems or treated in the context of didactic poetry do not ful l the postulated criteria. Thus,
Horace’s Ars poetica, while clearly exhibiting didactic intent as well as the typical teacher–student
constellation (the speaker v. the Pisones), does not show poetic self-consciousness (and therefore not
poetic simultaneity either). Interestingly, the speaker is clearly a (professional) poet (see esp. I I; 24–5), but
he never implies that the teaching speech he addresses to the Pisones is itself a poem. Rather, he ironically
pretends that it is because of his lack of poetic ingenium that, instead of writing poetry, he is reduced to
teaching it (301-8; esp. 306, nil scribens ipse docebo). This attitude is far removed from that of a typical
persona of didactic poetry, such as, for example, the speaker of the Georgics, and generally speaking, the Ars
poetica is much more reminiscent of Horace’s own Satires and Epistles (which typically present themselves as
sermo, that is, everyday speech, and not as poetry; see Sat. 1. 4. 39–42) than of the didactic poetry of his
time.

Ovid’s Fasti, too, cannot be called a didactic poem. It is true that the text exhibits poetic self-consciousness
to a high degree, exploiting the concept of poetic simultaneity in an unprecedented fashion, and also that
34
the speaker repeatedly addresses unnamed addressees in a manner reminiscent of didactic poetry.
However, there is no indication that the persona’s main intent is to teach anyone about the Roman calendar,
rather than simply to sing about it. In addition, the addresses to what one might call the anonymous
students occur in an extremely random and unsystematic fashion and are interspersed with addresses to
numerous other characters, especially to deities and other informant gures.

While the Ars poetica and the Fasti (as well as Parmenides’ poem) are thus not didactic poems in the sense
adopted here, they, as well as many other texts or parts of texts, obviously show a certain similarity to
works that unequivocally belong to didactic poetry. We might say that they are written in the didactic mode,
p. 43 with the term mode here being used according to the de nition of Alastair Fowler: ‘Mode … is a selection
or abstraction from kind [‘kind’ = ‘genre’; see above]. It has few if any external rules, but evokes a historical
35
kind through samples of its internal repertoire’ (A. Fowler 1982: 56; see also 106–11). Thus, a text in the
didactic mode is reminiscent of a didactic poem by virtue of exhibiting characteristics typical of didactic
poetry, most often by casting a speaker, at least temporarily, in the role of teacher. For example, Anchises’
extended presentation of the future Roman heroes to his son Aeneas in Book 6 of the Aeneid (713-892) could
be described as a speech in the didactic mode (cf. D. Fowler 2000: 206–7): Anchises expresses a clear
intention to ‘teach’ Aeneas (esp. te tua fata docebo, 759; see also 716–18, 722) and repeatedly addresses him,
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 Acababa de bajar el Doctor una cuesta muy pendiente, y se hallaba en
una hondonada, por donde corría un arroyo, en cuyas márgenes había
muchos álamos y otros árboles y matas, que hacían el paraje sombrío,
formando verde espesura.
Siempre distraído el Doctor en sus cavilaciones no vió ni oyó que de
repente salieron en la arboleda cinco hombres á caballo, y con inaudita
rapidez se le pusieron delante, atajando el camino. No lo advirtió, ó no tuvo
tiempo para advertirlo; tan ligera fué la maniobra de los jinetes, hasta que
uno de ellos gritó: ¡Alto ahí!
Entonces vió el Doctor que cuatro de los cinco le apuntaban con las
escopetas. Quiso volver atrás para escapar, dando un rodeo, y notó que otros
tres hombres á pie, armados también de escopetas, se le venían encima.
Estaba completamente cercado, y en tan estrecho círculo, que ni para
revolverse le quedaba tiempo ni espacio.
—¡Ríndete ó mueres!—gritó otro de los de á caballo.
Hallábanse los enemigos tan cerca, y era tan apremiante la situación, que
todo lo que no fuese rendirse era una temeridad; pero nuestro héroe
desesperado de que en medio de su viaje le detuviesen, tomó una resolución
tremenda. Cogió del arzón de la silla una pistola, la montó, y apuntando al
de á caballo que tenía más cerca, le dijo:
—Abre paso, tunante, ó te levanto la tapa de los sesos. Al mismo tiempo
hirió fuertemente con las espuelas los ijares de la jaca, á fin de salir
escapado, rompiendo por entre la cuadrilla de foragidos.
Éstos, que tenían también montadas sus armas, apuntando al Doctor,
hubieran sin duda disparado, dejándole muerto, si la voz del Capitán no se
hubiera oído á tiempo, diciendo:
—No le matéis, no le matéis: es mi paisano Don Faustino López de
Mendoza.
El Doctor vaciló asimismo un instante en tirar, viendo la generosidad
que con él se usaba.
Todo esto fué obra de un segundo. La jaca, excitada por los espolazos,
iba ya á abrirse camino. Al atajar al Doctor los bandidos de á caballo, se
tocaban con él. Las bocas de las escopetas rozaban su cuerpo. La pistola del
Doctor podía matar á quemarropa al más cercano de los bandidos.
 No había ya tiempo de explicaciones ni de transacciones, y, sin duda,
hubiera habido alguna muerte, á pesar del grito del Capitán, si de pronto no
se hubiese sentido el Doctor asido fuertemente de uno y otro brazo por dos
de los de á pie, bastante robustos ambos para arrancarle de la silla y dar con
él en el suelo por detrás del caballo.
En los esfuerzos que hizo para desasirse, apretó el gatillo y disparó la
pistola; pero el tiro fué al aire, sin herir á persona alguna.
En el suelo ya, y detenido por los dos que le habían derribado, oyó el
Doctor la voz del Capitán, que le decía:
—Sr. D. Faustino, su merced es mi prisionero. Ríndase su merced, y
déme palabra de honor de que no intentará huir, de que me seguirá donde le
lleve y de que no tratará de emplear la fuerza contra nosotros. Su merced
volverá á montar en su jaca, y esta buena gente le respetará y considerará
como debe.
D. Faustino no tuvo más remedio que prometer lo que el Capitán le
exigía.
Apenas lo prometió, uno de los bandidos, que había tomado la jaca de la
brida, la acercó para que D. Faustino montase, y él, suelto ya, montó en la
jaca. Obedeciendo luego á una seña del Capitán, entró con los bandidos por
una vereda que había en medio de los olivares, apartándose del camino real
en tan belicosa compañía.
 XXII.
LA VENGANZA DE ROSITA
Después de los sucesos que se refieren en el capítulo anterior, había
pasado ya una semana, y nada se sabía en Villabermeja del paradero de Don
Faustino. Su madre, llena de angustia, procuraba en balde averiguar dónde
se hallaba un hijo tan amado.
Rosita, entre tanto, furiosa con los celos y los agravios, difundía por
todas partes que D. Faustino, prendado de María, había huído con ella,
sentando plaza de bandolero en la cuadrilla de Joselito el Seco. Como
alguien afirmase que la noche en que huyó D. Faustino, y como no sólo
Rosita, sino también Jacintica, diesen por seguros los amores de María con
el Doctor, nadie dudaba en el lugar, salvo el padre Piñón, de que D.
Faustino estuviese por su gusto con los bandoleros.
La propia ruina de la casa de los Mendozas hacía verosímil á los ojos de
aquellos lugareños el que D. Faustino hubiese adoptado determinación tan
heroica para salir de apuros.
El padre Piñón era el único que sabía que María no se había ido con el
Doctor, el único que sabía dónde María se hallaba; pero á nadie quería
confiarlo. Calculaba además que D. Faustino, no por su voluntad, sino muy
á despecho suyo, había caído en poder de los ladrones; pero, como
afirmando esto hubiera dado á Doña Ana más pesar que consuelo, el padre
Piñón se callaba.
Rosita no creía mentir asegurando que el Doctor estaba con María entre
los bandidos. Rosita lo daba todo por evidente. Su furia celosa la
estimulaba, pues, de contínuo. Las excitaciones á su padre para que la
vengase no cesaban á ninguna hora.
D. Juan Crisóstomo Gutiérrez, aunque avaro, usurero y poco escrupuloso
en punto á moral, tenía dos prendas de carácter que le hubieran movido á
obrar benignamente en aquella ocasión, si Rosita no le hubiese violentado.
D. Juan Crisóstomo era compasivo y cobarde.
Por un lado, le inspiraba piedad la aflicción de Doña Ana, y no quería
acrecentarla. Por otro lado, persuadido, como Rosita, de que D. Faustino se
había hecho bandolero, temía que viniese á su vez á vengarse, ó cogiéndole
á él para matarle ó darle, por lo menos, una paliza, ó bien yendo á sus
caserías para incendiar alguna, ó romper las tinajas y las pipas, derramando
el aceite, el vino y el vinagre, y haciendo de todo una trágica ensalada.
La figura del Doctor Faustino, acompañada de Joselito el Seco y de un
coro de facinerosos, era la pesadilla del pobre Escribano. Durmiendo
soñaba con que le habían ya secuestrado y le daban martirio; despierto,
recelaba descubrir al Doctor ó á algún emisario suyo en cuantos hombres
venían hacia él.
Pero si el Escribano temblaba de excitar la cólera del Doctor, todavía
temblaba más delante de Rosita. Rosita le ponía entre la espada y la pared.
¿Qué medio le quedaba? ¿Cómo resistir á los mandatos de aquella hija
imperiosa, de aquel tirano de su voluntad, frenético entonces de ira?
No hubo más recurso. El Escribano concitó á los acreedores, que le
obedecían más que puede obedecer á Rothschild cualquier banquerillo de
mala muerte, y reunió créditos contra la casa de Mendoza por valor de cerca
de ocho mil duros. Eran escrituras y pagarés vencidos todos y que no se
habían renovado, quedando así el deudor al arbitrio de los acreedores,
quienes seguían cobrando los réditos mientras les convenía ó no se
enojaban, y quienes, no contentos con los réditos, exigían asimismo una
gran dosis de humildad y agradecimiento, so pena de enojarse y de pedir al
punto el capital de la deuda, conminando con la ejecución.
Tal era el estado de la casa de los Mendoza, por culpa del difunto D.
Francisco, y por poca habilidad, descuido y mala ventura de D. Faustino y
de su madre. Su caudal, mal cultivado por falta de capital, con los frutos
malbaratados siempre, apenas producía para pagar los enormes réditos de
aquella deuda. Varias veces se había tratado de vender fincas para pagar lo
que se debía; pero en los lugares pequeños hay una afición extraordinaria á
tirar de los pies á los ahorcados. Cuantos tienen algún dinero andan
siempre acechando la ocasión de que alguien esté en apuros y quiera ó
necesite vender algo para comprárselo por la tercera ó cuarta parte de su
justo precio. Aun así, piensan que favorecen al vendedor, pues le dan
dinero, cuyos intereses son grandísimos, á trueque de tierras, que producen
poco como no se esté sobre ellas y se emplee un capital de metálico y de
inteligencia en su administración y cultivo.
D. Juan Crisóstomo hizo aún laudables esfuerzos para calmar á Rosita.
Rosita llegó á decirle que preferiría ser hija de Joselito el Seco á ser hija
suya; que si la hija de Joselito fuese la agraviada, su padre la vengaría.
D. Juan Crisóstomo no quiso ni pudo ser menos que Joselito el Seco, y
por medio de su aperador envió recado á Respeta, diciéndole que los
acreedores de los Mendoza no querían aguardar más; que era menester
pagarles en el término de diez días, y que, de lo contrario, serían ejecutados
los Mendoza.
Rosita, no contenta con esto, dictó ella misma una carta insolente á Doña
Ana, amenazándola si no pagaba en el término señalado. El Escribano,
aunque resistiéndose y con mano temblorosa, tuvo que firmar la carta.
Respetilla, cuando se enteró de todo por su padre, fué á casa del
Escribano, habló con Rosita, le echó en cara su mal proceder y trató de
suavizarla. Viendo que era inútil la dulzura, empezó á echar fieros y á
desvergonzarse con Rosita; pero ésta se revolvió enérgica contra él y le
arrojó de su casa con cajas destempladas. Ganas se le pasaron á Respetilla
de dar una soba á la hija del Escribano, y aun de sacudir el polvo al
Escribano mismo; pero el miedo de provocar un lance sangriento con algún
criado de aquella casa, lance que podía terminar en que le enviasen á Ceuta,
tuvo á raya los ímpetus de su lealtad y devoción á D. Faustino. Harto hizo el
fiel escudero con no volver á ir en casa del Escribano y privarse del dulce
trato de Jacintica, con quien cortó relaciones.
Sobre Doña Ana, entre tanto, habían venido todas las penas juntas.
Su hijo no parecía y su inquietud se aumentaba. Para consuelo, la
amenazaban con la vergüenza de una ejecución, con la ruina total de su casa
y hacienda.
Lo único que quedaba en casa, ya en el mes de Mayo, era un poco de
vino, cuyo valor en venta no ascendería á diez mil reales. Doña Ana mandó
á Respetilla que llamase á los corredores para que le vendiesen por lo que
quisieran dar. Pero ¿qué eran diez mil reales cuando necesitaba ciento
sesenta mil?
Doña Ana escudriñó todos sus armarios y cómodas; juntó la poca plata
labrada y algunos dijecillos que conservaba aún; y aunque tampoco, por
bien vendidos que fuesen, importarían más de otros diez ó doce mil reales,
Doña Ana se decidió á venderlos.
Por último, venciendo su extrema repugnancia y sofocando su orgullo,
acudió á su única amiga de corazón: escribió una carta á la niña Araceli,
pintándole con vivos colores la terrible cuita en que se hallaba y pidiéndole
auxilio.
Respetilla, encargado de llevar la carta y las joyas, montó á caballo y
salió de viaje para el pueblo de la niña Araceli.
La infeliz Doña Ana, no pudiendo resistir por más tiempo tan crueles
emociones, cayó enferma en cama con una espantosa calentura.
El pueblo, en medio de estos lances, se había dividido en bandos. Unos
aplaudían la venganza de Rosita; otros la censuraban. Éstos juzgaban
abominable la conducta del Doctor, á quien ya suponían transformado en
bandolero; aquéllos pensaban que Rosita era el mismo demonio, y que el
seducido por ella había sido el Doctor, sin que ella tuviese derecho para
lamentarse de su abandono y para tomar tan despiadada y bárbara
venganza. Toda Villabermeja ardía, pues, en chismes, suposiciones y
disputas.
El padre Piñón era el más decidido partidario de los Mendozas. El
médico y él venían á visitar con frecuencia á la enferma Doña Ana, y el ama
Vicenta la cuidaba con el mayor esmero.
—¿Dónde habrá ido á parar D. Faustino?—se preguntaba á sí mismo el
padre Piñón, ya que á nadie se atrevía á confiar sus secretos pensamientos.
—¿Habrá caído en poder de Joselito? Me temo que sí... Yo lo avisaré á
María, la cual ya sé que está en salvo, gracias á Dios. Allá veremos cómo
recobra su libertad el señorito D. Faustino.
 XXIII.
CONFIDENCIAS DE JOSELITO
Fuerza es volver ahora á hablar del Doctor, quien, como sospecharán los
lectores, seguía en poder de Joselito el Seco.
Á poco de estar con él comprendió el Doctor que Joselito venía en busca
de su hija, con el intento de robarla de casa del padre Piñón, donde había
averiguado que se escondía por espías y amigos que tenía en Villabermeja.
El padre Piñón y María habían prevenido á tiempo este golpe, huyendo
ella, sin que se supiese hacia donde.
El Doctor sufrió un prolijo interrogatorio de Joselito, quien, informado
también de que su hija andaba enamorada del Doctor, no sabía cómo
explicarse aquel viaje nocturno de D. Faustino.
Joselito no receló que su hija, sabedora de que él venía en su busca, se
hubiese escapado y que el Doctor fuese persiguiéndola; pero, aunque lo
hubiese recelado, era ya tarde para alcanzarla. Don Faustino, no obstante,
ocultó la fuga de María y buscó razones para explicar su viaje nocturno,
hasta que vió que Joselito, por caminos extraviados, los llevaba á
Villabermeja, con el evidente propósito de penetrar en casa del padre Piñón.
Para evitar este lance, el Doctor, ya cerca del pueblo, declaró que María
había huído y que él había salido persiguiéndola.
Joselito exigió al Doctor su palabra de honor de que decía verdad; y
convencido de que el Doctor no le engañaba, echó sus cuentas, y decidió
con gran rabia que ya era imposible alcanzar ni detener á su hija antes de
que llegase á cierto punto, donde estaba segura.
Desistió, pues, Joselito de entrar en Villabermeja; y él y su partida y su
prisionero anduvieron, durante muchos días, vagando por diferentes sitios,
fuera de los caminos reales, y haciendo noche en caserías y cortijos, donde
Joselito tenía partidarios ó cómplices.
El Doctor, completamente desorientado ya, no sabía en qué punto, ni
siquiera en qué provincia de Andalucía se encontraba.
Fiado Joselito en la palabra de honor dada por el Doctor y en el
compromiso que había contraído, le dejaba ir en su jaca, con sus armas, y al
parecer completamente libre, aunque dos bandidos le vigilasen
constantemente.
No se permitió al Doctor que escribiese á su madre, por más que lo pidió
con gran empeño. Por lo demás, estaba todo lo regalado, considerado y
atendido que en aquella vida era posible.
Algunas veces se apartaron de Joselito varios de la partida, presumiendo
D. Faustino que fuese para algún lance ó golpe de poca importancia, porque
luego volvían, y notaba el Doctor que hablaban con el Capitán y que
dividían y repartían dinero.
Á todo esto, el Doctor se desesperaba cada vez más, rabiaba ó cavilaba,
y no atinaba con la razón de que así le llevasen cautivo.
Joselito era hombre de tan pocas palabras, que no había modo de que el
Doctor pusiese nada en claro, por más que le interrogaba.
Una noche, por último, estando en una casería, que debía de ser de algún
señor rico, pues había cuartos de dormir bastante cómodos y bien
amueblados, Joselito dijo al Doctor que deseaba hablarle á solas. Subieron
juntos al cuarto del Doctor, que era el más elegante y lujoso, y allí tuvieron
la siguiente conferencia:
—Sr. D. Faustino—dijo Joselito el Seco,—no era mi intención secuestrar
á su merced. Yo iba en busca de mi hija; hallé á su merced por casualidad;
le reconocí, y dé su merced gracias al cielo de mi buena memoria y de lo
mucho que se parece á su padre, porque si no le reconozco, su merced sería
ya pasto de los grajos; le reconocí, digo, y le he detenido entre los míos.
Hoy quiero y debo decirle mis propósitos y muchas cosas que me importan
y que le importan.
—Hable V., Joselito—interrumpió el Doctor:—la curiosidad me
consume hace días.
Ambos interlocutores se sentaron entonces, frente á frente, en sillas que
había junto á una mesa sobre la cual estaban dos candeleros de cristal con
sendas velas ardiendo.
La traza de Joselito era de lo menos patibularia que puede imaginarse.
Alto y esbelto de cuerpo; la tez blanca, aunque tostada del sol, y el pelo
negro, si bien con algunas canas. Parecía ser hombre de cuarenta años, pero
bien conservado y robusto. Los ojos eran entre garzos y verdes, rasgados y
dulces. Gastaba Joselito patillas y llevaba afeitado el bigote, luciendo, en
una boca pequeña, dientes blancos, iguales y bien formados. En suma,
Joselito era un majo muy guapo, y se conocía que en su no lejana mocedad
habría sido lo que se llama un real mozo.
—Aquí donde V. me ve—dijo á D. Faustino,—yo estaba destinado á
hacer otra vida harto distinta de la que estoy haciendo; pero el hombre
propone y Dios ó el diablo dispone. Cuando yo tenía diez y ocho años
estaba de novicio en el convento de Villabermeja. Bien se acordará de
aquellos tiempos el padre Piñón, que me quería en extremo por el fervor y
excelente voz con que yo cantaba las cosas de iglesia, y porque me suponía
tan humilde y sencillo, que siempre andaba diciendo que yo iba á ser un
santo. Tal vez lo hubiera sido, si no llego á ver á Juanita. Antes hubiera
cegado. Juanita frecuentaba mucho la iglesia en compañía de su madre
Doña Petra la viuda. Esta buena señora era muy presumida y entonada. Se
jactaba de hidalga, y no sin razón. Su madre, la abuela de Juanita, había
sido una hermana de su abuelo de V., señor D. Faustino. El pobre novicio
tuvo, pues, la audacia de poner los ojos en una parienta de los Mendoza.
—¿De quién era viuda Doña Petra?—preguntó el Doctor.
—De un arriero enriquecido—contestó Joselito.—Eso importa poco. El
caso fué que yo me enamoré perdidamente de Juanita. Mis ardientes
miradas lograron excitar en su alma un amor igual al mío. En la misma
iglesia nos hablamos con tal recato y disimulo, que Doña Petra no sospechó
nada. Juanita y yo nos pusimos de acuerdo. Yo me escapaba por la noche
del convento é iba á verla á su casa, saltando por las tapias del corral. Así
seguían nuestros misteriosos y felices amores, cuando la belleza de Juanita
despertó, en una feria, gran cariño en el corazón de cierto mayorazgo de la
ciudad de..., no distante de Villabermeja. Doña Petra concertó el casamiento
de Juanita, la cual no se atrevió á oponerse; pero me informó de todo al
momento. Ambos nos decidimos entonces á huir. La noche en que estaba
todo dispuesto ya para la fuga, que iba á ser en un mulo que había en el
convento, llevando yo á las ancas á Juanita, fuí á buscarla y á sacarla de su
casa. Por desgracia, el novio mayorazgo, que rondaba por allí con un criado
suyo, me vió cuando yo saltaba la tapia del corral, y antes de que cayese yo
del otro lado, me asió de una pierna, y tirando de mí con violencia, logró
derribarme en el suelo. Me levanté al punto algo magullado, y antes de que
me rehiciese me aplicó el mayorazgo tres ó cuatro furiosos puntapiés,
llamándome ladrón. Casi me derribó en el suelo otra vez, pues era hombre
forzudo de veras. Á pesar de mi turbación y malas andanzas, tuve tiempo de
ver y reconocer en quien me maltrataba á mi rival aborrecido. Los celos,
entonces, y la ira y la vergüenza de verme afrentado de un modo tan cruel,
me hicieron olvidar toda mi humildad de novicio, que tanto el padre Piñón
celebraba. Mi antigua mansedumbre se trocó de repente en ferocidad y en
encono. Las llamas del infierno abrasaron mi corazón en deseos de pronta y
terrible venganza. El diablo, á quien sin duda hube de llamar en mi socorro,
me oyó y me proporcionó los medios en el acto. Junto al sitio hasta donde
el último puntapié me había echado había un montón de gruesas piedras.
Agarré una, y con la velocidad del rayo volví contra mi enemigo, y antes de
que tratase de parar el golpe, se le dí con tal tino y brío sobre la cabeza, de
la cual al pegarme había dejado caer el sombrero, que le hundí y rompí los
huesos de un modo horroroso, haciéndole caer muerto á mis plantas. Fué
todo esto tan instantáneo, que el criado no había tenido tiempo para
favorecer á su amo. Cuando le vió caer, sintió miedo de mí y empezó á
gritar: «¡Al asesino, al asesino!» Lleno yo de terror, todo confuso y
aturdido, pues era al cabo la primera muerte que hacía, no tuve serenidad
para huir. Salieron hombres de varias casas; me prendieron; me entregaron
á la justicia, y, por último, me condenaron á presidio. Con los años y las
desgracias deseché en presidio los escrúpulos que en el convento me habían
inspirado; conocí á fondo lo que es la vida, y ví que era mala mi estrella y
que sólo á fuerza de valor podía yo dominar su influjo funesto. Un día,
mientras trabajábamos en un camino, concerté tan hábilmente las cosas con
cuatro compañeros, que logré recobrar mi libertad en su compañía, no sin
que perdiese la vida uno de los capataces que quiso detenernos. Desde
entonces ando en este oficio en que ahora me vé su merced, y no es posible
que ande en otro. Juanita murió miserable y deshonrada mientras estaba yo
con la cadena. Dejó una hija, que es María. Yo adoro á mi hija, señor D.
Faustino. La quiero por ella y porque es un recuerdo vivo de Juanita; pero
María se avergüenza de mí, me huye, no quiere verme. Los que la han
educado le habrán inspirado quizás algunas buenas ideas; pero se han
olvidado de inspirarle amor y hasta respeto á su padre. Sea yo quien sea,
¿dejaré de ser su padre? ¿No es un mandamiento de la ley de Dios el que
ella me ame y me respete?
Mucho había que contestar á esto; pero al Doctor no le pareció prudente
ni oportuno ponerse á disputar con Joselito, y permaneció callado.
 XXIV.
SUNT LACRIMÆ RERUM
Viendo Joselito que el Doctor nada contestaba, prosiguió hablando de
esta manera:
—V. no me contesta, Sr. D. Faustino, porque cree que mi hija hace bien
en huir de mi lado, en aborrecerme, en despreciarme quizás; pero yo me
examino, me juzgo y no me hallo ni despreciable ni aborrecible. Quiero
conceder que hubo un momento de mi vida en el cual fuí completamente
libre y del cual pendió toda mi conducta ulterior. ¿Cuál fué ese momento?
¿Fué cuando recibí los puntapiés y demás afrentas del mayorazgo? ¿Debí
aguantarme y sufrirlos con resignación? ¿Es así como no hubiera sido
despreciable? ¿Estuvo quizá mi culpa en no medir ni calcular bien ni el sitio
en que dí con la piedra, ni la violencia que la piedra llevaba? ¿Dependió de
mí entonces tener serenidad y acierto para no matar al mayorazgo y
magullarle y vengarme, quedando bien puesto mi honor, ó, si los novicios
no deben hablar de su honor, mi dignidad de hombre? Para evitar aquel
trance, ¿debí acaso renunciar al amor de Juana, aconsejándole que engañase
al mayorazgo y se casase con él, dando gusto á su madre, y siguiendo yo de
novicio, como si tal cosa? Esto hubiera sido muy cómodo para todos, pero
hubiera sido muy ruín. Lo mejor, dirá V., hubiera sido no enamorarse de
Juana, no seducirla. Pero ni yo seduje á Juana ni ella me sedujo. Fuímos el
uno hacia el otro, atraídos por un impulso irresistible, como van el río á la
mar y el humo á las nubes. Nada... estaba escrito... era mi sino. No lo dude
V.: yo hubiera sido un santo si no llego á ver á Juana. El diablo se valió de
ella para perderme y de mí para perderla, sin que ni ella ni yo pudiésemos
evitarlo.
El Doctor sintió el prurito de contestar á todos aquellos sofismas, con los
cuales el bandido trataba de justificarse; pero calculó que era inútil.
Además, no se hallaba el Doctor con autoridad suficiente. Su moral era
clara y severa en la teoría, pero en la práctica dejaba mucho que desear.
Concediéndose los mismos bríos de Joselito, el Doctor se ponía en su lugar
y aceptaba la muerte del mayorazgo como obra suya. No hay que decir que
los amores con Juana, el saltar por las tapias del corral y el proyecto de
rapto, no parecían al Doctor impropios de su carácter; él hubiera obrado del
mismo modo en iguales circunstancias, mas sin considerarse por eso exento
de culpa. Donde ya veía el Doctor una culpa con la que jamás se hubiera
manchado, era con la fuga de presidio y con haber adoptado después la vida
de bandolero. De esto no se absolvía el Doctor. ¿Había, sin embargo,
razones para absolver á Joselito? Tampoco. Los principios de la moral, la
ley de la conciencia, la intuición viva de lo justo y de lo bueno no resultan
de largos y prolijos estudios: lo mismo están grabados en el alma del
hombre de ciencia que en la del campesino más rudo. El que borra, tuerce ó
desfigura esos principios, esas leyes, esas nociones, es siempre responsable,
es culpado. El error de su entendimiento implica una falta de la voluntad,
que se empeña en sofisticar las cosas para acallar la voz de la conciencia.
No se puede negar que en ciertos pueblos, entre gentes selváticas ó
bárbaras, esa degradación, ese obscurecimiento de la moral es obra de la
sociedad entera: el individuo puede, por lo tanto, no ser responsable de
todo; pero en el seno de la sociedad europea no es dable suponer ignorancia
ó perversión invencibles. Por más que se ahonde, por más que se descienda
hasta las últimas capas sociales, no se hallará el abismo obscuro donde vive
un ser humano sin que la luz penetre en su alma y grabe allí las reglas de lo
bueno y de lo justo.
Así pensaba el Doctor, en nuestro sentir muy atinadamente, por lo cual
distaba mucho de justificar á Joselito el Seco y de ver en él una víctima de
la fatalidad, del sino, según él decía.
Joselito, permaneciendo siempre mudo el Doctor, trató de justificar y
hasta de glorificar su oficio.
Todo cuanto se ha dicho en libros y periódicos sobre lo mal organizada
que está la sociedad, sobre el modo que tienen muchos de adquirir la
riqueza explotando á sus semejantes, sobre el mal uso que de esta misma
riqueza se hace después, tiranizando y humillando á los pobres, todo se lo
sabía y lo explicaba Joselito; todo lo ha sabido y explicado, con menos
método y orden, pero con más viveza y primor de estilo, cuanto ladrón ha
habido en Andalucía desde hace años. El Tempranillo, el Cojo de Encinas
Reales, el Chato de Benamejí, los Niños de Écija y tantos otros, sabían poco
menos en esta censura de la economía social, que Proudhon, Fourier ó
Cabet pueden haber sabido. Joselito el Seco no se quedaba á la zaga.
Tales declamaciones contra la sociedad parecían en aquellos tiempos, y
aun en años después, tan sin malicia, que las novelas de Eugenio Sué, El
Judío errante, Martín el expósito y Los Misterios de París, llenas del
espíritu del socialismo, se publicaron en periódicos moderados como El
Heraldo.
Dejando aparte la cuestión de si es ó no justa, y de hasta qué punto lo es
la censura, no se ha de negar que, aun suponiendo parte de la propiedad
fundada en el robo, ora por violencia, ora por astucia, no es modo de
remediarlo robando también por medio de la astucia ó por medio de la
violencia, ya con la fuerza colectiva y grande de un estado revolucionario,
ya con la fuerza menos potente de una cuadrilla de bandoleros. Joselito el
Seco, no obstante, entendía ó quería dar á entender que sí, apoyado en un
antiguo refrán, cuya importancia es inmensa. El refrán dice: Quien roba al
ladrón tiene cien años de perdón; y en este refrán se apoyaba para afirmar,
no ya que no cometía ningún delito, sino que ejercía todas las obras de
misericordia, cifradas y compendiadas en una. En efecto, Joselito no robaba
jamás sino á los ricos, á quienes despojaba sólo de lo que le parecía
supérfluo, dejándoles lo necesario. Hacía muchas limosnas, socorría no
pocas necesidades, y enviaba dinero á varios puntos para misas y funciones
de iglesia, porque era muy buen cristiano. Sostenía Joselito que casi todo lo
que había robado se lo había robado á ladrones, y los de su cuadrilla jamás
se echaban sobre la presa sin exclamar: «Rindete, ladrón, y suelta la bolsa».
La excesiva abundancia de dinero induce además á los hombres á que se
entreguen á la ociosidad, madre de todos los vicios; á que se traten con
sibarítico regalo, y á que ofendan á Dios, en suma, por no pocos caminos.
Por donde Joselito afirmaba que, despojando á muchos de lo supérfluo,
había contribuído poderosamente á la mejora de sus costumbres y les había
abierto y allanado el sendero de la virtud.
Después de esta apología, Joselito dió nuevo giro á su discurso, y habló
de la hacienda y casa de los Mendoza, cuyo estado conocía; lo pintó todo
como perdido sin remedio, y por último, dió al Doctor las noticias recientes,
que por sus espías y amigos él había recibido de Villabermeja, sobre la
venganza de Rosita y la amenaza de ejecución.
 El dolor y la rabia de D. Faustino fueron muy grandes al saber tan tristes
nuevas. Al pensar en el apuro y desconsuelo en que estaría su madre, no
acertó á contener las lágrimas que brotaron de sus ojos.
—¡Por vida del diablo!—dijo Joselito,—¿qué lágrimas son esas? Un
hombre recio no llora nunca. ¿Quiere V. vengarse? Yo le doy mi auxilio.
Nada tiene V. ya que esperar de la gente. Rompa V. con toda. Declárele la
guerra con valor. ¿Sería V. acaso el primer mayorazgo arruinado que se ha
hecho de los nuestros? Una palabra resuelta de V., y V. es aquí el amo. En
tres ó cuatro días nos ponemos en la Nava, y hacemos, si V. quiere, una
atrocidad. El Escribano usurero nos soñará toda la vida. Le quebraremos las
tinajas, vertiendo el vino y el aceite; le mataremos las reses; y si esto no
basta, le incendiaremos la casería.
D. Faustino no pudo menos de romper entonces el silencio que hasta allí
se había impuesto.
—Joselito—dijo,—cada hombre tiene su natural y su modo de proceder.
Yo no quiero probarle á V. que V. obra mal; pero no puedo menos de decirle
que yo pienso de muy diversa manera y no puedo hacer nada de lo que V.
hace. El Escribano, usurero por sí ó en nombre de otros, pide lo que le
pertenece de derecho. Ninguna injuria me infiere. Nada tengo que vengar.
Aunque mi madre muriese de pena, no pensaría yo que el Escribano usurero
fuera el causante de su muerte. La culpa sería mía, que con mi imprevisión
no he sabido evitar tanto bochorno.
—Me aflige oir á V., Sr. D. Faustino—replicó Joselito.—No quisiera
ofender á mi prisionero; mas no puedo resistir á la tentación de decir á V.
que es V. un blandengue. Es treta muy común negar la injuria para excusar
el peligro de la venganza. Tiene V. razón: la injuria que no ha de ser bien
vengada ha de ser bien disimulada.
El Doctor perdió los estribos: se puso más colorado que una amapola; se
olvidó de que Joselito estaba armado siempre; se olvidó de que á una voz de
Joselito podrían acudir sus hombres y darle muerte en el acto.
—¡Voto á Dios!—dijo,—que yo no disimulo injuria alguna, y menos la
de V., que es quien me injuria. ¿Piensa el ladrón que todos son de su
condición? ¿De dónde, por perdido que yo esté, puede V. inferir que yo voy
á adoptar la infame vida que V. lleva? Repito que el Escribano está en su
derecho; que no me injuria, y basta que yo lo diga. El Escribano obra como
quien es: es ruín y obra ruínmente; pero no me injuria.
 Joselito, en el primer momento, estuvo á punto de romper la cabeza al
Doctor, que así se desahogaba. En todos los días de su vida había tenido
Joselito tanta paciencia. Reportó su cólera. Allá en su interior casi se alegró
de que la persona de quien su hija andaba enamorada tuviese tantos
arrestos.
—¡Bien está!—dijo.—Á quien hoy toca, no disimular, sino perdonar las
injurias, es á un servidor de V., Sr. D. Faustino. No disputemos más. Cada
loco con su tema.
—Dispense V., Joselito, si me he exaltado un poco.
—La cosa no es para menos. Comprendo que debe de estar V. más
quemado que candela. Sentiré quemarle más; pero me importa recordar el
pacto que hemos hecho. V. tiene algo viva la sangre y puede olvidarlo á lo
mejor. Un caballero tan cabal, que está en su punto, sería una lástima que se
cegase y faltase á lo pactado.
—Yo no faltaré nunca.
—Con todo, no está demás recordar á V. que es mi prisionero; que ha
prometido no huir ni hacer armas contra nosotros, sino seguirme y
obedecerme.
—En cuanto no se oponga á mi honor ni á mis principios.
—Convenido. Pues sepa V. ahora, Sr. D. Faustino, que por más que no
quiera V. ser de nuestra compañía, V. ha de permanecer conmigo á modo de
cimbel ó reclamo.
—¿Qué significa eso?
—La cosa es muy sencilla. ¿Para qué sirven el cimbel y el reclamo? Para
que las avecillas enamoradas acudan donde ellos están. Pues para esto me
está V. sirviendo. Deseo que mi ingrata hija venga á mí; y ya que no venga
por amor de su padre, vendrá por amor de usted. Para esto sigue V. en mi
poder. Luego que venga María, yo concertaré con ella el precio del rescate.
Yo tengo donde ella viva segura y con mucho regalo. ¿Por qué no ha de
vivir María donde esté bajo el dominio de su padre, donde su padre pueda
verla? ¿Por qué ha de andar huyendo siempre de mí?
El plan del bandido era hábil. El Doctor no dudó de que María iba á
venir en busca de su padre, á fin de salvarle á él del cautiverio. El caso era
triste. Él iba á tener la culpa de que aquella mujer, que había podido hasta
entonces librarse de padre tan tremendo y de vivir como su cómplice á costa
de sus robos, cayese en poder del capitán de bandoleros. Las súplicas y los
insultos hubieran sido inútiles para hacer que Joselito cambiase de
propósito. El Doctor se calló por consiguiente.
Dos días después del coloquio que acabamos de referir, permanecían aún
los bandidos y el Doctor en la hermosa casería de que se ha hablado. Sin
duda esperaban la llegada de alguien: casi de seguro, imaginaba el Doctor,
esperaban la llegada de María.
Eran las diez de la noche. Se oyeron resonar fuera de la casería los
cascos de dos caballos, que á poco llegaron y pararon á la puerta. Joselito,
su tropa y el Doctor se hallaban tomando el fresco en el patio, cuando el
bandido que estaba de atalaya entró seguido de dos hombres. El uno, que
parecía criado, venía descubierto; el otro venía embozado en su capa hasta
los ojos y con el ala del sombrero tapada la frente y envueltos en sombra los
ojos mismos. Sin desembozarse, sin descubrirse, dijo el incógnito:
—Á la paz de Dios, caballeros.
—Á la paz de Dios—le contestaron.
Encarándose luego con Joselito, añadió:
—Dios te guarde. Guíame á un cuarto cualquiera. Tengo que hablarte á
solas.
Estas palabras, pronunciadas con imperio, fueron oídas con profundo
respeto por Joselito, que conoció en la voz á quien las pronunciaba. Guió,
pues, al embozado á un cuarto, donde hizo poner luces. El criado quedó en
el patio aguardando en silencio. Los caballos en que habían venido amo y
criado estaban fuera de la casería, atados de la brida á unas argollas que al
efecto había en la pared.
La conferencia duró más de una hora; y terminada que fué, el embozado
partió con su acompañante, á quien el mismo Joselito vino á llamar para
que siguiese á su amo. Las pisadas de los dos caballos que se alejaban se
oyeron resonar desde el patio.
—Señor D. Faustino—dijo entonces Joselito—, tenga su merced la
bondad de venir conmigo.
El Doctor siguió á Joselito al mismo cuarto donde con el embozado
había estado hablando. Solos allí, con voz conmovida dijo Joselito al
Doctor:
 —Todos mis planes se han deshecho. Es mi sino. Hay una fuerza
superior á mi voluntad que me avasalla y sujeta. María no ha muerto; pero
V. y yo debemos considerarla como muerta. No la volveremos á ver más.
Para nada le necesito á V. ahora. He prometido además al hombre que acaba
de irse de este cuarto que pondré á V. en libertad inmediatamente. Voy á
cumplir la promesa. ¿Quiere usted irse ahora mismo?
—Estoy impaciente por ver á mi madre, por salvarla, por consolarla al
menos. Ahora mismo me voy—contestó el Doctor.
En balde intentó averiguar quién era el personaje misterioso que
procuraba su libertad, y, sobre todo, cuáles eran el paradero y el destino de
María, para que tuviese él que considerarla como muerta. Joselito no quiso
ó no pudo revelarle nada. Mandó que ensillasen la jaca del Doctor y que dos
de los de más confianza de la cuadrilla se preparasen á acompañarle.
Todo dispuesto ya, el Doctor se despidió de Joselito alargándole la
mano, que éste apretó amistosamente entre las suyas.
Por trochas y atajos, por sendas extraviadas, caminando más de noche
que de día, llegaron, al tercero, el Doctor y su comitiva á un sitio distante
media legua de Villabermeja y muy conocido del Doctor, porque estaba en
el camino de su casa de campo. Allí los bandidos le pidieron su venia para
volverse. El Doctor se la dió de buen grado, con mil gracias por el favor que
le habían hecho. Procuró también darles el dinero que llevaba consigo; pero
la caballerosidad y desprendimiento de aquellos valientes no lo consintió.
Empezaba á clarear cuando el Doctor se quedó solo. Era una mañana
hermosísima. Con la impaciencia de volver á ver á su madre, puso el Doctor
espuelas á la jaca, y pronto se halló en el lugar y á la puerta de su casa, que
vió abierta, aunque tan temprano.
Entonces le dió un vuelco el corazón. Presintió una desgracia. Una nube
de tristeza nubló sus ojos.
Faón fué el primero que salió á recibirle; pero en vez de mostrar
contento, daba aullidos tristes.
Bajó el Doctor de la jaca, y dejándola en el zaguán, entró por el patio,
sin hallar á persona alguna. El podenco iba delante, aullando á veces, como
si quisiera darle una nueva dolorosa.
Al ir á subir la escalera para dirigirse al cuarto de su madre, apareció la
niña Araceli y se echó en los brazos del Doctor.
 —¡Hijo mío, hijo mío!—dijo.—¿Dónde has estado? ¡Gracias á Dios que
sano y salvo te volvemos á ver!
—Tía, ¿cómo está V. por aquí? ¿Qué ha pasado?
—Tu madre está enferma, hijo mío.
—No me oculte V. la verdad, tía. Es inútil. Mi madre...
—No subas ahora... está durmiendo.
—Está durmiendo un sueño eterno—exclamó el Doctor.—Mi madre ha
muerto.
La niña Araceli ni afirmó ni negó, pero prorrumpió en amargo llanto.
El Doctor subió precipitadamente la escalera. Iba á dirigirse á la alcoba
de su madre, cuando el ama Vicenta le detuvo á la puerta, diciéndole:
—No está aquí.
Instintivamente se fué entonces hacia la sala-estrado. También allí estaba
á la puerta otra persona: el padre Piñón.
—Déjeme V. que entre y la vea,—dijo D. Faustino.
El padre Piñón, juzgando ya inútil todo disimulo, respondió al Doctor:
—No entres; no perturbes su reposo: pide á Dios que descanse en paz.
D. Faustino cayó llorando entre los brazos del Padre.
—¡Ha muerto!—dijo.
—Ha muerto como una santa,—contestó el padre Piñón.
—Soy un miserable. Yo la he muerto con mis locuras. ¡Dios mío! ¡Dios
mío! ¿por qué no me matas á mí?
—Quia Dominus eripuit animam tuam de morte,—dijo el Padre, que
siempre llevaba el Breviario en la memoria, y que entonces, además, le traía
en la mano, abierto por el Oficio de Difuntos.
—Hijo mío—añadió,—reza por tu madre, reza por tí; mira que en estas
grandes tribulaciones el rezar es el mayor consuelo: Tribulationem et
dolorem inveni, et nomen Domini invocavi.
—Es cierto—respondió D. Faustino;—he hallado la tribulación y el
dolor, pero no he hallado la fe.
—¡Qué horror! Si has de hablar así, vete, no profanes este sitio.
El Doctor tomó entonces maquinalmente el Breviario que tenía el padre
Piñón. Fijó sus ojos en la página por donde estaba abierto, y leyó unas
desesperadas sentencias del libro de Job, encarándose al leerlas con el
Padre, como si le contestara.
—Mi alma—dijo—tiene tedio de mi vida. Hablaré con amargura de mi
alma. Diré á Dios: no quieras condenarme. Manifiéstame por qué me juzgas
así. ¿Por ventura te parece bien el que me calumnies y me oprimas?
Aterrado el Padre de que así convirtiera el Doctor el bálsamo en veneno,
le arrancó el Breviario de entre las manos.
D. Faustino se precipitó dentro de la sala.
En medio de ella, en un féretro, entre cuatro blandones ardiendo, hacía
más de veinticuatro horas que estaba su madre de cuerpo presente.
D. Faustino se acercó al féretro con silencio respetuoso; se hincó de
rodillas como quien pide perdón, y levantándose luego del suelo, se inclinó
sobre el rostro de la difunta, le contempló con honda pena, y exclamó como
si anhelase despertarla:
—¡Madre, madre mía!
Respetilla, que estaba velando el cadáver; el padre Piñón; Doña Araceli,
que había subido, y el ama Vicenta, callaban y lloraban.
El Doctor, aproximando, por último, los labios á la cara pálida y
desfigurada de Doña Ana, la besó en la frente y en las mejillas.
Los que asistían á este espectáculo se apoderaron de D. Faustino, y casi
por fuerza le sacaron de allí y se le llevaron á su cuarto.
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