This is the first monograph on the poetics of Philodemus, an Epicurean acquaintance of Horace and Virgil, since the pioneering Harvard thesis of N. Greenberg in 1955 (belatedly published in 1990). Over the intervening decades understanding of the Herculaneum papyri has been steadily advanced by a combination of technological innovations (including digital infrared imaging) and the chalcenteric assiduity of specialists; parts of the picture have visibly shifted even since the 1995 collection Philodemus and Poetry edited by D. Obbink. McO.'s project has been facilitated, in particular, by the editions of four books of Philodemus’ On Poems by R. Janko, who supervised the Michigan Ph.D. thesis on which this book is based. Although McO.'s work provides consistently helpful clarification of the central issues raised by what survives of On Poems, it will not make easy reading for anyone unused to grappling with the perplexities, sometimes the baffling obscurity, of Philodemus’ texts in their badly damaged form, even if a little authorial joke hidden in the index (a subentry on p. 300 reads ‘unintelligible, of this book: passim’) is, fortunately, an exaggeration.
The book comprises an introduction, five chapters and an extensive appendix in which several topics, including Philodemus’ relative insouciance about genre, are pursued further. The introduction sets out what can be reconstructed of the overall design of On Poems, stressing Philodemus’ argumentative strategy of first summarising and then ‘refuting’ the views of those he targets. Making a number of subordinate observations along the way (including the work's ‘mystifying’ lack of any discussion of Plato, p. 5), McO. sketches the salient themes of his inquiry: Philodemus’ Epicurean reliance on a supposedly natural ‘preconception’ (prolēpsis) of what poetry is, his insistence on the poetic marriage of form and content, and his ‘intellectualist’ axiom that it is the mind, not the senses, that judges poetic success.
Chapters 1–2 provide a mixture of background and contextualisation. Chapter 1 surveys the attitudes to poetry adopted by earlier Epicureans, from Epicurus himself to Philodemus’ teacher, Zeno of Sidon (from whom Philodemus probably acquired his penchant for hard-hitting polemics), foregrounding their seemingly uniform rejection of any life-guiding or truth-bearing status for poetry: Metrodorous even asserted, with provocative hyperbole, that it was unimportant whether one knew which side Hector was on in the Iliad (perhaps an ironic play with the image employed at Iliad 5.85?). Chapter 2 compiles a brief ‘lexicon’ of Hellenistic poetics before reviewing what can be recovered of the principles espoused by the main figures whom Philodemus attacks, including euphonist critics barely if at all known from elsewhere (Andromenides, Heracleodorus and Pausimachus: not all of whom, it should be borne in mind, Philodemus himself read at first hand rather than in doxographies), as well as Crates of Mallos, Aristotle and a number of other Peripatetics (among them, Heraclides of Pontus and Neoptolemus of Parium, the latter a supposed influence on Horace's Ars poetica), and various Stoic critics. Both these chapters are well grounded and informative.
The three remaining chapters contain the core of McO.'s account of Philodemus’ conception of poetry. If, in headline terms, there is not that much which was not already apparent to Greenberg almost 70 years ago, the devil is in the detail, and there is a lot of detail thoroughly sifted here, with the support of impressively au courant textual scholarship. McO.'s achievement depends on the patience with which he negotiates his way through the thorny thickets of Philodemus’ fragments, drawing help, where possible, from other treatises, not least those on rhetoric and music. All fragments are quoted with functional, if sometimes awkward, facing translations, chiefly Janko's (with adjustments); discrepant translations of the same passage occasionally occur (e.g. pp. 24/164, 119 n. 109/191). Chapter 3 argues that Philodemus took poetry to be a methodical technē in its basics, but left room for a freer creative capacity responsible for the success of individual poems. McO. also explains that, while Philodemus flatly denied poetry's (moral) utility, this did not preclude the possibility that particular readers might be benefited or harmed in some cases, nor prevent Epicurean philosophers from identifying material for ethical discussion in poetry. In Chapter 4 McO. explores at length the central Philodemean tenet that in good poetry form and content do not operate independently, as many of those he attacks seem to have supposed, but fuse together within an integrated whole. While McO.'s analysis is largely well executed, his use of the terms ‘content’ and ‘form’, which do not correspond exactly to Philodemus’ Greek vocabulary, is not always sufficiently sensitive to the potential ambiguity of ‘content’ between, roughly, subject-matter (e.g. a particular myth), which can exist before/outside a given poem, and the thought/sense (dianoia, Philodemus’ favoured vocabulary) specific to an individual poem. Instability in this regard induces McO. to contrast Philodemus with Aristotle's notion of conceiving the plot before writing a play (p. 156) and yet, just three pages later, to speak of ‘Philodemus’ idea that the plot is prior to its treatment in language’ (p. 159 n. 15; cf. p. 30). Chapter 4 ends with an attempt to illuminate Philodemus’ poetic principles by examining selected points of expressive detail in metre and diction in his epigrams: the rationale for this exercise (repeated in the following chapter) is dubious; it leaves the main problems of interpretation in the theoretical fragments exactly where they were.
The final chapter deals with a pair of interlocking issues, Philodemus’ criteria for the judgement of poetry and his conception of poetry's psychological effect. Both issues have complex connections with the form-content dyad. Philodemus is evasively vague about what counts as ‘good’ poetic subject-matter, but insistent on its effective rendering into a verbal fabric that pleasurably stimulates the mind and also, it seems, gives rise to what McO. calls ‘further thoughts’ (see Poem. 2.70.24–8, where comparison with pseudo-Longinus, Subl. 7.3 might have been instructive). McO. vacillates over whether these further thoughts reside in poems as such (qua ἔμφασις, a sort of suggestive richness) or in readers’ responses. The dichotomy is perhaps artificial, especially given the paucity of pertinent evidence, but matters are not helped by the muddle McO. gets into over Philodemus’ use of the old term psuchagōgia for poetry's impact on the mind. He translates this repeatedly as ‘entertainment’, yet concedes (p. 200 n. 25: a tangled note) that this is ‘too weak’ for what, it transpires, he takes to be a kind of ‘mental transport’ and imaginative enlargement of the reader's ‘mental vistas’ (pp. 209–10). Even so, ‘entertaining diversion’ (p. 224) is his final word on the matter – a paltry return, one might complain, for Philodemus’ expenditure of five volumes on relentless polemicising, though that is not the fault of McO.'s industrious scholarship.
The book contains a fair number of small blemishes, mercifully few of them in the Philodemean fragments (but see e.g. missing word-spaces and wrong accents on pp. 34, 132, 135, 241). They include: p. 19 (misconstrual of ὥστε in Epicurus, KD 1), p. 27 n. 42 (‘partes pro totibus’), p. 29 (mistranslation of the present participle ἀκροωμένους), p. 32 (for ‘II.32’ read ‘I.197–8’, with ‘§6’ not 7), p. 41 (eight mistakes in a single sentence from Diogenes Laertius), p. 65 (garbled translation of Aristotle), pp. 68, 159, 295 (προσωποποιία has a missing syllable throughout), p. 105 (seven words of Greek in passage 1 are omitted from the translation, and χοίνικα is rendered as ‘piglets’), p. 136 (‘Heracleodorus’ wrongly, twice, for Andromenides; again at p. 195), pp. 184, 245–7 (deficient punctuation of epigrams), p. 214 (ἡμέας for ἡμεῖς), p. 221 n. 5 (Paul, not ‘Otto’ Kristeller). In the bibliography, several items are out of order, Nussbaum's Therapy of Desire, cited as Nussbaum (2009), i.e. second edition, on p. 224, is missing, and Wilkinson appears as ‘Wilkenson’ with two items nowhere cited in the book. Democritus and Lucretius (cf. p. 39 on the latter's paradoxical relationship to Epicurean poetics) are absent from the general index.
