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The Capture of Silenus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

M. Hubbard
M. Hubbard
Affiliation:
St Anne's College, Oxford
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Extract

A possible place to start yet one more discussion of the song of Silenus is to reiterate Otto Skutsch's ‘robuste Fragestellung’ of 1956: ‘Was will im Grunde die sechste Ekloge besagen?’ One could argue that the answer is ‘Gar nichts’: this is perhaps the implication of some treatments, notably of Zeph Stewart's article and of at least the first part of Williams's discussion of the poem in Tradition and originality in Roman poetry. Anyway it is a tenable hypothesis that we should regard the values of the sixth Eclogue as purely formal and that it is a positive error to look behind its exquisite formal ποικιλία for some discursive statement about life or poetry or both. ‘Look behind’ is certainly what in this case we have to do if we want a discursive statement, because overtly the poem makes no such statement. But from antiquity to now it has been hard to rest with the hypothesis that the poem's values are purely formal, and this recurrent unease seems motivated by something about the poem, not just something about its readers: reluctant or not, at intervals most of us do grit our teeth and say: ‘Etwas besagt sie schon.’ The variety of views about what that something might be and the sad banality that the something too often turns out to exhibit have not so far deterred us from trying to find it.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 21 , 1975, pp. 53 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 1975

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References

page 53 note 1 RhM XCIX (1956), 193 ffGoogle Scholar.

page 53 note 2 HSCP LXIV (1959), 179–205Google Scholar.

page 55 note 1 To Euphorion-hunters I offer fr. 32 in which he agrees with Theopompus (F. Gr.Hist. 115 F 393) in making Caranus rather than Perdiccas the central figurein that legend.

page 56 note 1 J. Perret's reference to Arist. fr. 283 might also be put in this context (Sileni Theologia, in Vergiliana, Recherches sur Virgile, publiées par Henry Bardon et Raoul Verdière (Leiden, 1971), p. 303)Google Scholar.

page 57 note 1 Of course it is possible that what is not in pseudo-Plutarch was in Posidonius or indeed in Crantor, especially if Gigon (op. cit. [below, p. 58 n. 2], p. 31) is right in suggesting that Crantor made more use of the Eudemus as a pattern than of the Phaedo; but it is not a necessary assumption.

page 58 note 1 It has been suggested to me that as an Epicurean Virgil would not have been allowed to read the works of other schools. But after all Atticus was an Epicurean.

page 58 note 2 In Aristotle and Plato in the mid-fourth century, Papers of the Symposium Aristotelicum held at Oxford in August, 1957, edited by Düring, I. and Owen, G. E. L. (Göteborg, 1960)Google Scholar.

page 60 note 1 I do not mean to imply that the Eudemus anticipated the developed theories of de Anima III, only that Aristotle might already have raised the question whether an object of Nous's contemplation is itself, and been aware that this involved problems.

page 60 note 2 The interpretation of Lehmann, K., JRS LII (1962), 62 ffGoogle Scholar. would be relevant.