I

First, however, let us turn to Republican literature. The following two-line epigram by C. Licinius Calvus has naturally attracted much attention:

It is usually translated in a way such as the following:

Translated thus, however, the humour of the distich is not immediately apparent,Footnote ⁴ and, although explaining jokes has the effect of making them less amusing, it may be useful to go over the grammar. Calvus is here exploiting the expectations set up by the expression sibi uelle. Sibi uelle can indeed mean ‘to want something for oneself’ with sibi serving as a dative of advantage:Footnote ⁵

The expression can also, however, serve as a verb of meaning. To give a brief example: in Terence's Phormio, when Geta emerges from Demipho's house, he begins thanking the goddess Fortuna in an animated fashion (O Fortuna, o fors Fortuna …); as they watch him, Antipho puts the question to Phormio:

Here, the emphasis is on what Geta means by his expression – just three lines later Antipho asks the same question of Phormio in a different way:

Sibi uelle can therefore be translated as ‘to mean’ in the context of a question beginning with quid.Footnote ⁶ To return to the scenario that Calvus presents: Pompey scratches his head with one finger. We then have the phrase quid credas hunc sibi uelle?, where sibi uelle can either be translated as a verb of meaning or a verb of desiring. Because Pompey is performing an action that might be taken as a signal (scratching his head), it is perfectly possible to interpret the first part of the epigram in the following way:

That is to say, it could be inferred that the speaker is inquiring as to what Pompey is attempting to communicate. Of course, this interpretation of sibi uelle is utterly deflated by the single word that follows, uirum, where we find out that Pompey is not attempting to communicate anything by the act of scratching his head: he simply wants (uelle) a man for himself (dative of advantage). It is this surprise (fulmen in clausula), which would have been particularly acute in the context of oral recitation, that gives the epigram its particular effect.

In the Latin, of course, only the one expression is used – sibi uelle – for both ‘to mean’ and ‘to want for oneself ’; the difference is clear in English, but a native Latin speaker would not have drawn strong distinctions here. The key thing to note, however, is what one expects will follow as an answer to Calvus' question, quid credas hunc sibi uelle?: for sibi uelle in the sense of ‘to mean’, we would expect a statement elucidating what Pompey means by scratching his head. We are, however, only presented with a noun – uirum – and this can only cohere with the interpretation of ‘to want for oneself’: ‘he means a man’ would not make sense in this context.Footnote ⁷

II

There is a second aspect of the expression that I would like to discuss (and this will be especially important for what follows): sibi uelle could be used to describe not only the intentions of human beings, but also what texts and expressions signify.Footnote ⁸ For the former we have the example found in sentence 3 above, together with the pun in sentence 1; for the latter we might cite instances such as the following:Footnote ⁹

In these two examples we translate sibi uelle as ‘to mean’ in the sense of ‘to signify’: neither the remark nor the story mean things in the way that Phormio or Pompey mean things – remarks and stories do not have intentional states – but the expression sibi uelle can nevertheless be applied to them as a synonym for a verb like significare.Footnote ¹⁰ This is an informal use of sibi uelle, and we generally see it in colloquial writing, although it also appears in authors such as Livy.Footnote ¹¹

The fact that the phrase sibi uelle could be used of texts as well as people could be exploited for effect in Latin, whereby the expression's metaphorical possibilities spring to the fore; here is an example from the end of the prologue to Terence's play The Eunuch, where the poet is addressing his audience:Footnote ¹²

Terence was aware of the fact that the phrase could be used in the two different ways that we have considered, as the quotations from the Phormio (sentence 3) and the Heautontimorumenos (sentence 6) demonstrate. Because the name of the play in sentence 8 is a word (‘eunuch’) that usually denotes a person with intentions, and because the phrase sibi uelle can be used either of human beings or texts, Terence can exploit the different ways in which the expression could be used and suggest that the text of his play is itself a human being: this ‘play’ on words is obviously a fitting punchline for the end of the prologue.Footnote ¹³ It is a very early instance of such an exploitation of these two different ways in which sibi uelle could be used, and illustrates a readiness to realize the metaphorical possibilities of expressions of meaning in one of the earliest strata of literary Latin.

III

The ambiguity discussed in the previous section (II) is in fact a common one among the modern European languages. The English verb ‘to mean’ can certainly denote a number of things, and it is partly on account of this that questions such as ‘what is the meaning of life?’ are tough nuts to crack.Footnote ¹⁴ The verb may refer, for example, to the intentions of an individual in performing an action (‘Henry meant to hit the ball’),Footnote ¹⁵ to what someone or something means to us emotionally (‘beer means a lot to me’),Footnote ¹⁶ or to what words mean in terms of other words (‘Hoffnung means “hope”’). When it comes to the interpretation of written texts, there are certain applications of ‘to mean’ that particularly concern us, and these correspond broadly with what we noted in the case of sibi uelle. One application, for example, is found in expressions such as:

Here we have an allusion to the intentions of an author: Horace is said to have meant something by a phrase.Footnote ¹⁷ The subject of the verb ‘to mean’ is a human being, and the word introduces a statement about what he intended. We also, however, frequently come across phrases such as the following:

These last sentences, number 10 appealing to the literal meaning of the line, number 11 to any number of things, appear to take a form similar to the one that preceded them (sentence 9), but the key difference is that here the Latin text is the subject of the verb ‘to mean’ rather than a human being.Footnote ¹⁸

The ambiguity is found in other modern languages as well. The English verb ‘to mean’ is related to the German meinen. When learning German we are generally taught that meinen refers to what a speaker or author means:

This is not a hard-and-fast rule, however, as the word meinen can be also used of inanimate objects, including texts:

Sentence 14 is both poetic and antiquated, but sentences similar to 15 are common enough in both conversation and literary criticism today. The modern German verb meinen can therefore be used to refer to what an individual means as well as to what a text means.Footnote ²⁰

In French, the phrase vouloir dire also means ‘to mean’, and can be used of what human beings intend as well as what words, events and things signify:

The same general pattern is refracted across the Romance languages (Italian: volere dire; Portuguese: querer dizer; Spanish: querer decir).Footnote ²³ The expression vouloir dire can therefore be used of both authors and texts, just like the Latin sibi uelle, the English ‘to mean’ and the German meinen.

Something similar occurs in ancient Greek with the verb βούλομαι (often ‘I will, wish, am willing’), which can serve as a verb of meaning. Here is an excerpt from Plato, where it is applied to a speaker:Footnote ²⁴

The word βούλομαι can, however, be used of texts as well; the following example is also from the Republic:Footnote ²⁵

It is clear that the law is not literally meaning (or wishing) something in the same way that an individual means something intentionally, but once again the same verb is used of both people and texts, albeit in different ways. A further example might be found in the Greek verb λέγω, which can be used of people when they mean something by the act of speaking:Footnote ²⁶

The verb λέγω can, however, also be used of what words indicate and mean (literally, ‘say’):Footnote ²⁷

Further Greek verbs seem also to fit our pattern, in that they are generally used of human beings and their intentional states but can also be used of things like words, writing tablets, oracles and the like. The following examples involve verbs whose standard meanings are ‘to wish’ (θέλω), and ‘to think’ (νοέω):

The use of the same verbs and expressions of meaning for both what human beings mean (or intend) and what words or texts mean (or signify) is therefore exemplified throughout the western literary tradition: if we look back to see how others have used similar verbs to our own, we will see the same ambiguity reflected. Indeed, it seems to be the case that every active verb that we use in English to describe what texts do in communication can also be used of human beings.

IV

I would now like to suggest that our own familiarity as modern critics with expressions of meaning that can be used as synonyms for both ‘to intend’ and ‘to signify’, such as those covered in §§ II and III, can affect how we interpret similar expressions in ancient texts. Let us turn to a phrase that involves a Latin expression of meaning, hoc uult dicere, as it is represented in the Virgilian commentary of Servius.Footnote ³² My question is: what does hoc uult dicere actually mean in Servius' commentary? In a certain sense its meaning does not matter – the expression serves as an ‘ = ’, telling the reader that what follows is the equivalent of what precedes it. Yet it would be somewhat embarrassing, given the nature of the phrase, if we were unable to determine how the grammar works. Here is a compact example from Servius:Footnote ³³

There are three different ways in which we might attempt to construe the phrase hoc uult dicere:

1. a) This (hoc, nominative) means:

2. b) He means this (hoc, accusative):

3. c) By this (hoc, ablative) he means:

a) This interpretation finds support in the phrase hoc est,Footnote ³⁴ frequently used in ancient literary exegesis, which serves much the same purpose as hoc uult dicere and takes hoc as its subject. We might further expect that since the phrase sibi uelle can be used of texts as well as people, as we have seen, something similar might be the case for hoc uult dicere. Third, and perhaps most importantly, this interpretation is in keeping with contemporary usages in literary criticism of expressions such as the French phrase vouloir dire (as well as the English ‘to mean’), particularly in the case of the expression ça veut dire (‘this means’), and is therefore attractive for the modern reader. I suspect that this is the natural reading for many native speakers of English (it was certainly the way I first interpreted the phrase).

Closer investigation suggests that we exercise caution, however: in Book 11 of the Aeneid, Camilla addresses Turnus and states that she will face Aeneas' army. Servius has this to say about the opening words of her speech:

The phrase in bold type has haec (Camilla) as the subject of uult;Footnote ³⁵ the phrase is otherwise precisely the same as in the other examples (save for the autem). We might therefore surmise that the poet Virgil is the subject of uult in the other examples, and that hoc serves either as a direct object or as an ablative of means. If we give weight to sentence 26, the phrase hoc uult dicere probably does not mean ‘this means’ in Servius, although we must not, of course, rule out the possibility that the same sequence of words is being used in two different ways.

b) This, as it turns out, appears to be a better way to interpret the phrase, in light of the Servian passage quoted above.Footnote ³⁶ Beyond this, we might note that hoc can be used to point to a statement that is to follow, even when hoc is placed at the opening of the clause for emphasis.Footnote ³⁷ We might further note that the simple phrase hoc dicit (without the uelle), where the verb takes the poet as the subject and hoc as the direct object, is itself well attested in certain unambiguous situations in Servius:Footnote ³⁸

The bare word dicit, moreover, could be used after a lemma in order to refer to what Virgil means,Footnote ³⁹ as in the following example (where the poet Virgil is unambiguously the subject of dicit):

That later authors used the phrase hoc uult dicere in this way is shown by clear examples such as the following (from the thirteenth-century philosopher Bonaventura):

c) The final possibility is certainly good Latin, but it must be said that it is a less plausible interpretation of the grammar of the phrase hoc uult dicere than b), given the examples already cited.

Our (possible) intuitions about the first interpretative option would appear to be wrong in the case of Servius; as mentioned, I would argue that the way in which we interpret the phrase is largely dependent on the expectations raised by our knowledge of modern expressions of meaning – for example, the French phrase vouloir dire, which proves to be the syntactical equivalent of a faux ami, a false friend, in this context. Because the syntax of hoc uult dicere appears analogous to that of ça veut dire, and because it also corresponds with how we use expressions of meaning in a number of other languages in commenting on texts, we may be tempted to interpret the Servian phrase in a particular fashion.

V

How then do Servius' descendants, modern literary critics, use such expressions in their own writing? The two uses of the phrase sibi uelle that we looked at in § II – to describe what human beings mean and what texts mean – are mirrored in similar verbs and expressions in various modern languages, as we saw in § III. This poses an interesting philological question in its own right, but it also has ramifications for literary criticism at large. In brief, I would now like to argue that the metaphorical possibilities of the group of verbs and expressions to which sibi uelle belongs allow us to obscure some of the differences between texts and authors.Footnote ⁴¹ While it is impossible to avoid metaphorical language when speaking of what texts do (and I myself use it throughout this paper) I would argue that it is nevertheless important to be aware of it, as it has a bearing on how we do criticism.

The practice of personifying texts extends back to the classical world. The following is a famous excerpt from Plato:Footnote ⁴²

Texts are here likened to one's children, whom one is unable to protect from the world outside. The personification is facilitated by the fact that the word for ‘speech’ in Greek, λόγος, is masculine. The verb of thinking, ἐπίσταμαι, is applied to the λόγος: it does not know to whom it should speak (λέγειν) and always needs protection from its author (πάτηρ). Finally, we might note that the word/text is wronged (πλημμελέω) and suffers reproaches (λοιδορέω) at the hands of others unjustly. An analogous personification, this time of a book of poetry and facilitated by the masculine gender of the noun liber, is to be found in Horace's Epistles 1.20.Footnote ⁴³ Horace's book is likened to a young slave who seeks to escape the protection offered by Horace's private bookshelf and to venture out into the world at large; the book will regret its decision, cum plenus languet amator (8).Footnote ⁴⁴ There are in fact abundant instances of authors directly addressing texts as human beings in subsequent Roman literature.Footnote ⁴⁵ These personifications reveal how easy it is to treat texts as intentional, indeed wilful, subjects: we confide in them, they seem to speak to us, we lose control over them, they can be abused by our enemies. They also demonstrate how far back in western literary history the personification of the texts and the media on which they were written goes.

The erotic language used by Plato and Horace foreshadows a phenomenon in modern literary criticism. The metaphor of text = person became especially prominent in the latter half of the twentieth century, whereby the text was described in human terms and was capable of exhibiting emotions and mental states such as desire. Here are some examples from Roland Barthes' Le plaisir du texte (1973):

Countless instances might be offered from Barthes' pages, as well as from those of other influential critics of the sixties and seventies. The metaphor has since become a relatively common one, and nowadays nobody is particularly surprised to read of the text taking on the attributes and emotions of a human individual (albeit rarely to the degree that we see in Barthes). I would argue that expressions of meaning, such as the ones that we considered in §§ II and III, can contribute to and amplify this.

Texts are of course not human beings with intentional states, but rather modes of communication. Literally speaking, they cannot mean things in the way that human beings can; and, if pushed, nobody would claim that they could. It is nevertheless useful to be aware of the ambiguity of the verb ‘to mean’ in modern criticism, since when we say that a text means something we are effectively making ‘the text’ the subject of a transitive sentence for which a proposition is the object. This can contribute to the impression that the text is an agent of sorts, especially if the word is used in conjunction with other verbs that imply intentionality; in the process, discussion of the author's role may simply be left out. The fact that other western languages contain verbs and expressions of meaning that exhibit precisely the same ambiguity exacerbates matters: if one looks to what types of words critics have employed throughout western literary history in order to describe what texts ‘do’, one will find nothing radically anomalous in the ambiguity of ‘to mean’ in our own language.

There is of course an incentive to obscure the role of the author, since, from the New Criticism through to deconstruction and beyond, it has generally been considered advisable to avoid explicit reference to the author's intentions in commenting on a text: the text itself is the authority to which one appeals.Footnote ⁴⁹ It is probably unnecessary to provide examples of the personification of the text where the author slips by the wayside, since it occurs quite frequently in literary criticism,Footnote ⁵⁰ but it may be useful to point out an instance in classical scholarship where the metaphor of text = person involves the word ‘meaning’:

Here, Conte states that the text establishes a meaning with its reader, where the agency of the text is clearly apparent. But he also goes beyond this to use a more controversial term of the written word: the text here has an intention differentiated from that of its author.Footnote ⁵² Sentence 35 is an unusual case, of course, and it is impossible to avoid applying verbs and expressions to the text that may be interpreted as implying intentionality (and I repeat that I have done so throughout this paper), but the issue is an important one. The fact that we can apply the verb ‘to mean’ to the text often has the effect of relieving the critic of any pressing need to discuss what the author means, in part because the verb ‘to mean’ has already been used. It is useful to bear in mind that while texts regularly mean things they do so in a way very different from authors and speakers, and that speaking of what the text means to a reader does not, and cannot, fill the hole left by our not speaking about what the author means by it.Footnote ⁵³

Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations, already pointed out that we must be careful that we do not make errors when manipulating the metaphors and ambiguities inherent to our language. Different usages of a single word or phrase are appropriate to different contexts, but the fact that the same word may be employed in each can cause mistaken analogies between them. John Searle provides an unproblematic example of such ambiguity: the phrases ‘cut the cake’ and ‘cut the grass’ take the same form but denote very different actions by means of the verb ‘to cut’.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the one case, the action of cutting involves using a knife to slice through a substance, whereas in the other one is using a machine to shear back foliage. Nobody would try to cut grass by stabbing their backyard, nor would anyone try to run a machine across a birthday cake in order to cut it. This is because the differences between the uses of the one verb are very clear – the contexts for cutting a cake and cutting the grass are unmistakable, and learning about these contexts is part of learning language. In the case of sentences opening with phrases such as ‘the text means …’, however, it is often less clear what sort of activity is being implied, since the context is more abstract. When the verb ‘to mean’ is combined with other verbs that impute intentionality to their subject, the obscurity can be compounded.

While we have seen that the metaphor text = person is supported by the vocabulary of Latin and Greek and could be consciously exploited by ancient writers, ancient literary critics themselves were writing before the ‘death of the author’ and had fewer qualms about alluding to what authors meant. Servius, as we have seen, was referring to Virgil's intentions when he used the phrase hoc uult dicere in order to introduce an explanation (contrary, perhaps, to our expectations). Plato also gives an example in the Protagoras, in which the verb of meaning is attributed to the author rather than to his text:

It is not the poem itself that is intending, but rather its author Simonides. The critic registers a certain degree of uncertainty by means of the verb δοκεῖ, but he is not interested in any free-standing intention of the text itself: the author remains firmly in the picture. Alternatively, ancient writers could keep the two types of meaning that we have been exploring separate by using different terminology for each in a clear fashion. Here is Cicero:Footnote ⁵⁶

The scriptor, the person who writes, is first of all kept separate from the scriptum, that which is written: the first term denotes an active role, the other the product. In conjunction with this, Cicero uses the verb sentio when it comes to the intention of the author,Footnote ⁵⁷ but employs the word significo of what the text (scriptum) means. Although both words may be translated as ‘to mean’, they are here contrasted with each other in a clear fashion and this is reinforced by the choice of nouns. In English we also have means at our disposal for distinguishing between the two different things that are covered by the ambiguous verb ‘to mean’, since we can use verbs like ‘to intend’ and ‘to signify’ in tandem with specific nouns in order to accentuate the differences between what human beings and texts do.

VI

What, then, is ‘the meaning of the text’? Much depends on the way we are using the noun ‘meaning’.Footnote ⁵⁸ On the one hand, the meaning of a text can consist in what its author intended when he or she wrote it, and this is generally known as ‘speaker meaning’ or ‘utterer's meaning’. When someone misunderstands the note I wrote this morning, I can tell him or her that the note means such and such. On the other hand, a sentence can mean something to the reader regardless of what the author meant; to give an extreme example, the significance that one derives from the sortes described by Augustine (as well as the sortes Vergilianae) falls into this category.Footnote ⁵⁹ When we, as literary critics, argue about what a text means, we are at times arguing about different things that we happen to denote by means of the same label. What we should remind ourselves is that ‘meaning’ and its verb ‘to mean’ do not cover a single concept (as we saw in §§ II and III), and that disputes over ‘the meaning of the text’ frequently involve attempts at restricting the ways in which the term can be used.

Two examples present themselves, the second of which is of particular interest to those working in the field of classics. First, E.D. Hirsh in his book Validity in Interpretation sought to distinguish between the author's ‘meaning’ and the ‘significance’ this has for the reader, and thus to place the meaning of the text solely in the sphere of authorial production. According to Hirsch, the meaning of the text is fixed for all time when the author writes the text; this meaning is inalienable and a feature of the text for as long as it exists, even if it cannot be accessed by us. What changes over time and varies from reader to reader is the text's significance – what the text ‘says’ to us. Even for the author himself, whose understanding of his or her text changes, it is a matter of a change in the work's significance rather than of a change in its meaning:

By distinguishing between ‘meaning’ and ‘significance’, Hirsch was responding to critics who were uninterested in the author's intention when it came to criticism. According to Hirsch, authorial meaning (speaker meaning) was the only legitimate meaning associated with the text, and the role of the critic was either to work back to it or to establish the significance of the text, which was not necessarily the same as its meaning, to his or her own age.

Hirsch was of course rowing against the current.Footnote ⁶¹ One might contrast his view with a very different refrain that has been repeated a number of times over the past twenty years in classical literary criticism and reception studies:Footnote ⁶²

The main point here – that the author cannot determine the meaning of his text for its reader – is clearly correct; this is an important type of meaning, and it is inadvisable to limit the text's meaning to what the author means as Hirsch does. But Martindale's phrase is also provocative: the word ‘always’ jars with our notions about what the word ‘meaning’ can do, for reasons that should by now be obvious. The statement ‘meaning is always realized at the point of reception’ does not take account of the fact that ‘speaker meaning’ – what Ovid meant – certainly does not come into being at the point of reception: it was a force at the point of production. Martindale uses the noun ‘intention’ of what the author means, thus completing half of the disjunction referred to at the end of the previous section (‘to intend’ and ‘to signify’); but he uses the ambiguous noun ‘meaning’ for what the text signifies to a reader, which is frequently used as a synonym for ‘intention’. What we might desire in sentence 37 is a more explicit distinction between types of meaning; one might offer an unprovocative alternative such as ‘the meaning of a text for a reader is always realized at the point of reception’ or, more simply, ‘interpretation always occurs at the point of reception’.Footnote ⁶⁴

In sentence 37 we also find reference to the idea that we cannot be certain of the author's intention (‘we cannot assume that an “intention” is effectively communicated within any text’), and this epistemological insight drives many arguments against making statements about the author's meaning; how can I be certain that Calvus and Terence are actually punning? Does this lack of certainty not undermine any attempt to make statements about what the author meant? This is indeed an important issue; one reasonable response, albeit a trivial and unhelpful one, is that certainty is not something to which we should be aspiring when it comes to literary criticism, for the simple fact that it is hard to be certain about most things in human experience. Sceptical arguments concerning knowledge and our relationship to the world have a long history and continue to proliferate.Footnote ⁶⁵ The most that we can hope for in most walks of life is proof beyond reasonable doubt – to establish a strong case for a judgement based on the evidence that is to hand – and this is certainly the case when it comes to literary interpretation. While this of course does not solve the problem of uncertainty in criticism, it perhaps puts it in some perspective.

VII

Classical authors were of course aware that their texts could mean different things to their readership and they frequently exploited this for rhetorical effect: in essence, they meant their texts to mean different things.Footnote ⁶⁶ Juvenal provides us with a (likely) example of an author intending his words to be interpreted in different ways in order to increase the pungency of a line:

The translation of omne in praecipiti uitium stetit in line 149 has long been disputed; at the end of the nineteenth century, the standard way of translating it was ‘all vice stands at its zenith’, ‘at its highest point’, ‘auf dem Gipfel’ and so on, on the basis of the substantive praeceps.Footnote ⁶⁷ Citroni Marchetti, however, draws attention to the similarities between the vocabulary used by Juvenal and that found in a number of prominent descriptions of decline in the Roman moralistic tradition, which allude to Roman morals collapsing in praecipitia.Footnote ⁶⁸ She suggests that Juvenal's passage ‘caps’ these earlier conceptions of Roman decline: his contemporaries have exhausted the possibilities, and all vice has now come to rest (stetit – a true perfect) in a downward plunge (in praecipiti) – a callida iunctura that Juvenal's readership would have appreciated.Footnote ⁶⁹ In actual fact, however, it is probable that Juvenal simply intended line 149 to be interpreted in a number of different ways; it is the tension between the possible interpretations – the idea that vice can simultaneously be standing at its peak and at rest in a downward plunge – that makes the expression so effective.

Nor were ancient authors unaware of the importance of the reader when it came to interpretation; Ovid, for example, understood all too well that ‘a writer can never control the reception of his or her work’. In Tristia 2, a plea to Augustus for recall to Rome from Tomi, he dramatizes this fact, pointing out many of the contradictions and difficulties in making one's intentions clear to a readership.Footnote ⁷⁰ Ovid is ostensibly attempting to establish that he had not meant to corrupt the morals of Rome's matronae when he composed his earlier poem, the Ars amatoria. As he contends, he had provided the women with an explicit warning to stay away:Footnote ⁷¹

But this proviso, it turns out, was not enough: the poet was unable to confine his readership to ‘courtesans alone’ (solis meretricibus, Tr. 2.303). Ovid goes on to imply that the author is in fact entirely at the mercy of his readership, since any text can be twisted by the reader to yield a desired meaning (Tr. 2.255–6) – even the works of Ennius and Lucretius. Towards the end of the poem Ovid himself demonstrates the power of the reader by arriving at a wilful interpretation of Virgil's Aeneid, reducing the epic to the love story of Dido and Aeneas (Tr. 2.533–6). Thus, even as he apparently seeks to limit the possible interpretations of the Ars amatoria, Ovid reveals himself as perfectly aware of the futility of the gesture: he cannot force his readership to interpret his earlier poem as he might wish.

VIII

In conclusion, it will be useful to recapitulate the main contentions of this paper:

1. 1. Ancient authors could play on the ambiguity of sibi uelle, as we saw in the case of Calvus in § I and Terence in § II. In I, the point of Calvus' epigram lay in the fact that sibi uelle can be interpreted as both ‘to want for oneself’ and ‘to mean’; in II, in the prologue of Terence's Eunuch the poet was seen to toy with the idea that both texts and human beings can serve as the subject for sibi uelle: Terence's play The Eunuch is represented, in a sense, as a eunuch.

2. 2. The familiarity of the ambiguity noted in II and III may affect the way in which we as modern scholars interpret expressions of meaning in ancient texts, such as hoc uult dicere in Servius (§ IV): I have argued that the proper way of interpreting the phase is ‘he means this’ rather than ‘this means’.

3. 3. Expressions of meaning in literary scholarship can facilitate a personification of the text that allows us to avoid speaking of the meaning of the author, particularly when they are accompanied by other verbs that imply that the text is an intentional subject: the text is portrayed as an agent in its own right.

4. 4. The phrase ‘the meaning of the text’ can refer both to what the author meant or what the text means to us. It is unhelpful to restrict ‘meaning’ to one of these while excluding the other, since both things can be described by the term ‘meaning’.

Classicists are uniquely placed to contribute to the philosophical debates that surround the term ‘meaning’, since they can set these issues in a historical context and adduce examples from across a wide range of literature. But above all, it is important to be aware of them: this is a crucial group of expressions when it comes to literary criticism, and one that deserves special attention, since words such as ‘to mean’ and ‘meaning’ come naturally to us and we often use them without reflection. While we are generally concerned about what words and texts mean, it is always healthy to ask ourselves what we mean when we use the verb ‘to mean’.