Homeric effects in Vergil's narrative

212 Pages·2015·3.77 MB·English

by  Alessandro Barchiesi & Ilaria Marchesi & Philip Hardie

H O M E R I C E F F E C T S I N
V E R G I L ’ S N A R R A T I V E

H O M E R I C E F F E C T S I N
V E R G I L ’ S N A R R A T I V E
A L E S S A N D R O B A R C H I E S I
Translated by
ILARIA MARCHESI & MATT FOX
With a new foreword by
PHILIP HARDIE
and a new afterword by the author
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Princeton & Oxford
Copyright © 2015 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press
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In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press
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Originally published in Italian as La traccia del modello
© 1984 by Giardini editori e stampatori in Pisa
press.princeton.edu
Jacket photograph: detail of a silver cup from Hoby's Tomb
© Jens Vermeersch. Cropped from original.
Licensed under Creative Commons 2.0 license
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/)
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barchiesi, Alessandro, author.
[Traccia del modello. English]
Homeric effects in Vergil's narrative / Alessandro Barchiesi ; translated by
Ilaria Marchesi and Matt Fox with a new foreword by
Philip Hardie and a new afterword by the author.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-16181-5 (hardcover)
1. Virgil. Aeneis. 2. Epic poetry, Latin—History and criticism. 3. Narration
(Rhetoric)—History—To 1500. 4. Latin poetry—Greek influences. 5. Homer—
Appreciation—Rome. 6. Imitation in literature. 7. Rome—In literature.
8. Homer—Influence. 9. Rhetoric, Ancient.
PA6931.B3413 2015
873'.01—dc23
2014012449
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro and League Gothic
Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
C O N T E N T S
FOREWORD
by Philip Hardie
vii
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
xv
1
The Death of Pallas
Intertextuality and Transformation of the Epic Model
1
2
The Structure of Aeneid 10
35
3
The Arms in the Sky
Diffraction of a Narrative Theme
53
4
The Death of Turnus
Genre Model and Example Model
69
V
APPENDIX
The Lament of Juturna
95
AFTERWORD
by Alessandro Barchiesi
115
NOTES
135
WORKS CITED
175
SELECT INDEX
185
SELECT INDEX LOCORUM
188
INDEX OF MODERN AUTHORS
190
VI
F O R E W O R D
Alessandro Barchiesi began La traccia del modello. Effetti omerici
nella narrazione virgiliana by noting that twenty years had passed
since the publication of Georg Knauer’s monumental study of Ver-
gil’s use of Homer in the Aeneid, Die Aeneis und Homer. Studien zur
poetischen Technik Vergils (1964), a revision of Knauer’s 1961 Habil-
itationsschrift. It is now (2014) thirty years since the Italian publica-
tion of Homeric Effects in Virgil’s Narrative. It is astonishing to think
that La traccia was based substantially on its author’s honors thesis,
the work of a brilliant scholar in his early twenties.
Knauer’s book, building on centuries of Vergilian commentary
and drawing on the riches of German Vergilian scholarship of the
previous seventy years, was the first full and integrated study both
of the complex architecture of Vergil’s imitation of Homer and of
the filigree detail of Vergil’s allusion to particular episodes, lines, and
phrases of the Homeric epics. Fifty years on, Die Aeneis und Homer
remains the starting point for any study of Vergil and Homer. La
traccia was the product of a watershed in the history of Latin lit-
erary studies in the 1970s and early 1980s, a period that has largely
determined the way Latinists have been doing things down to the
present day. The young Barchiesi was at the very forefront of this
nouvelle vague; the book is already completely at home with a num-
ber of terms that have defined major approaches to the study of an-
cient literature over the last three decades but that in the early 1980s
were only beginning to make their way into the consciousness of
Anglophone Latinists: “narratology,” “intertextuality,” “reception.”
VII
VIII FOREWORD
The book also makes a significant contribution to another highly
productive area of Latin studies, the dialogue of genres, or generic
polyphony, with its perceptive analyses of Vergil’s refraction of Ho-
meric epic models through the lens of the outlooks and structures
of Attic tragedy.
Barchiesi’s early intellectual formation was in continental and
Russian literary theory, but the major achievement of La traccia is
to be located in the area of what has been perhaps the most influen-
tial Italian contribution to modern Latin literary scholarship, the
study of allusion and intertextuality. Prior to La traccia the major
landmarks are Giorgio Pasquali’s 1951 essay “L’arte allusiva,” and the
essays by one of Barchiesi’s own teachers at Pisa, Gian Biagio Conte,
collected in Memoria dei poeti e sistema letterario: Catullo, Virgilio,
Ovidio, a book published in 1974 but whose full impact outside Italy
had to await its English translation as the first part of G. B. Conte,
The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and
Other Latin Poets (1986).
La traccia advances the discussion in a number of ways. The Ital-
ian title puns in a manner not easily conveyed in English. Traccia
can mean “trace,” “trail,” or “track,” holding together two ways of
thinking about the relationship between a model text (in this case,
the Homeric epics) and an alluding text (the Aeneid): a reader may
either focus on fragmentary traces of the model text subsumed
within the structures of the alluding text or look for systematic Ho-
meric trails inscribed in the Vergilian text.1 Barchiesi has a particular
interest in a systematic approach to Vergil’s Homeric allusion, which
he contrasts with Pasquali’s attention to the “microcontext of poetic
memory” (chapter 4). La traccia draws out the importance of the
Homeric model for reading the plot of the Aeneid, demonstrating
the vital contribution of an awareness of Homeric intertexts to the
“legibility” of the Aeneid. Vergil’s reader is called upon to be atten-
tive both to the incorporation of Homeric stereotypes within the
Aeneid (for example, patterns of heroic behavior on the battlefield)
and to Vergil’s swerves from these stereotypes, examples of the oppo-
sitio in imitando (“opposition in imitation”) that earlier students of
allusivity had tended to examine at the level of the small-s cale detail.
The way that meaning is thus generated through divergences within
a horizon of expectations may also be compared to Francis Cairns’s
FOREWORD IX
use of the schemata of situational genres as a starting point for read-
ing ancient poetry, in his Generic Composition in Greek and Roman
Poetry (1972), to name an important work in the Anglophone tradi-
tion that was developing independently of continental work in the
late 1960s and early 1970s.
Barchiesi develops his approach through sustained and multilay-
ered readings of a limited number of passages in books 8, 10, and 12
of the Aeneid, together with a revelatory quasi-s tructuralist analysis
of the whole sequence of encounters on the battlefield in Aeneid 10.
In the several chapters he deploys the full armory of philological and
literary- historical weaponry in the service of a powerful intertextual
method. Not the least important service rendered by the book is the
demonstration of the inseparability of, on the one hand, formalist
readings, and, on the other, cultural- historical and ideological read-
ings (for programmatic statements of principle on the need to com-
bine the formalist and the historical, see chapter 4). Together with
Gian Biagio Conte, the second of Barchiesi’s thesis supervisors was
Antonio La Penna, the leading Italian Latinist in a marxisant tra-
dition of historical and political readings of poetry. In this respect
the book achieves an unusually satisfying coincidentia oppositorum,
steering a course between the Scylla of an inward- looking formal-
ism that is the fate of some intertextual and generic studies and the
Charybdis of an exclusive set toward the “culturalism” or “ideology
critique” against which Charles Martindale (2005) has taken up
cudgels.
La traccia generates complex, but never confusing, readings of
the Aeneid through two strategies: first the demonstration of the
presence within a single Vergilian episode of separate narrative
strands in the Homeric text (akin to what Knauer labels “Kontami-
nierung,” and to what I have labeled “combinatorial imitation,” with
reference to post- Vergilian epic imitations of the Aeneid);2 and sec-
ond, through an excavation of the different stratifications in the an-
cient reception of Homer, thus activating contrasts between the ide-
ology of Homer’s original audiences and the critical readings of the
philosophical and literary culture of later centuries. An outstanding
example of the first is the discussion of the climactic encounter of
Aeneas and Turnus at the end of the poem, which alludes to the duel
of Achilles and Hector in Iliad 22, to the general pattern of Homeric