The first thing to flag up is that this post-conference collection is about classics minus Greek/s and through Latin, and, at that, Latin literarity. It arises from a 2007 Yale gathering and presents fine contributions from established scholars on their own patch and on form. The topics are (ordered to suit the/this narrow traditional Latinist's viewpoint): Cicero, De Re Publica, Horace, Odes and Carmen Saeculare, Servius' commentary on, and Gavin Douglas' translation of, the Aeneid; Petrarch, Rerum Familiarum Libri, Ovidian Shakespeare, Joyce and Dylan.
(1) is the introduction of the ‘editorial committee’.
(2) J. Zetzel, master of sardonic narrative, unmasks the soon-to-be-cardinalised Angelo Mai's recovery (and ruination) of what remains of Cicero's Republic. His success as the last great discoverer of lost texts came from hitting on survival in palimpsest and homing on thrifty Bobbiana, he was a dead loss as editor (saved on this occasion by unacknowledged incorporation of input from Niebuhr busy in Rome inventing German scholarship-to-come), and he overplayed the hype heralding post-Buonaparte Italian reflorescence starring Pope Pius VII. For a moment of anticipation, you could glimpse a future for political thought/philosophy without troubling with Plato and all that Romantic Hellenism hot air, envisage classical reception plugging straight into modern statecraft and political activity for real, across Europe and the New World. They did, at the time, variously; but what they got was zilch by way of new historical data, and instead … routinised Plato-worship and, worst, more elegance – mere style. A phut of a last hurrah for classics and the public weal.
(5) R. Tarrant intones the story of musical settings inflicted on Horatian lyric down the centuries. Most of this business comes across as frippery leeching on prestige, in the face of the ‘obstacles’ pinpointed as ‘the verbal density of Horace's writing’ and ‘the awkwardness of his preferred line-lengths for modern musical styles’ (p. 84). Appropriations of the lyrics only started imagining how Horace may have heard music with Randall Thompson's ventures into archaism; excerption – tags – have been the rule, and nothing has come anywhere close to ‘the variety of tone and content Horace often encompasses within a single ode’ (ibid.), that is, to Horatian poetry.
(3) R. Kaster shows up a series of Servian comments which make sense once we see his project as designed to champion, in ‘honour culture’ fashion, Virgil's championing of Augustus through his ancestors. Unfortunate that the opening parable (on Sidney Bechet) still others the performative Virgil from ‘us’, from our assumptions for reading, as if the epic only sings, but does not fight, war. But awarding praise/blame at all costs can be nothing but polemical.
(7) E. Wilson turns us on to the first classical work Englished whole – or rather, Britished, in literarised dialect: Gavin Douglas's well-posthumously-published Middle Scots Eneados. Less of a crusade for nationalism, she shows, and more of a self-specifying drama of translation, where the storyteller projects his own labours onto the task of fetching Virgil, and Aeneas, and Augustus, and Rome, all the way over to ultimate British culture. Commandeering paratext from Ovid and Statius to bring into focus pious (faithful–responsible–responsive) and perseverant (Veggio's thirteenth labour and all) close reading that really could (have) clue(d) in … Edinburgh.
(6) G. Mazzotta writes a buccaneering account of Petrarch's ‘epistolary epic’ starring himself as a pirated Ulysses – another post-Odysseus in the wake of Aeneas and Ovid – re-experiencing Dantesque exile as polytropic, multi-addressing, open-ended, culture warrior. If only this exemplary figure, our Ciceronian columnist, survives; imagine, re-imagine, an empire of culture, ‘Roman, but … not Rome’ (p. 106). Wonder if you can.
Now we have passed from what reception can do to/for (Latin) classics on to what it has made/done with it/them.
(8) Speaking of witchcraft, G. Braden performs heady wizardry on Shakespeare-as-Naso, summoning up Prospero's invocation of spirits from Ovid-as-Medea (esp. Metamorphoses 7.197–209, with gilding from Golding) to model The Bard's tempestuous resignation from theatre as the papist pap and pokery Reginald Scot showed Medea's pharmacy to amount to for real (in Discoverie of Witchcraft). ‘Opportunism’ and ‘discontinuity’ rule in confecting this, as any other, intertextual brew of literary affinities into effectual self-authorisation (p. 125).
(4) J. Farrell does some more of his tracking of power packed into the Latin language (rather than literature). In order to articulate the Greekness-envy he wags and waves from his pages, Joyce actually deploys, takes over, and backs, the Latin he had drummed into him, classical through Catholic, in Stephen Dedalus' colourfully paradigmatic struggles with/against Irish indoctri-nation into Anglophonic Anglophobia.
(9) R. Thomas's already legendary (and ongoing) exposition of the constitutive brand of re-creativity developed by Bob Dylan through a half century now of songster troubadouring makes it here to mainstream readership and to classical studies. What Dylanography has detected by way of expropriation from the ‘Americana’ repertoire, in terms of folk/blues/country/rock, has been joined in ‘late-r’ output by a significantly increased quotient of ‘loving theft’ from poems in print, of transfer from text – including Virgil (through Mandelbaum's translation) and Ovid's exile poetry (through Peter Green). The unending performance craft that Dylan has made his life from never stops modulating tune and phrase, and (no doubt for a general audience's sake) Thomas reaches for the Homeric bard-rhapsode analogy to wangle some sort of grip on what is happening here (‘on the border between oral and literary cultures’, p. 152). Chasing Dylan is chasing elusiveness: whether his 2012 Tempest heralds his ‘late-st’ resignation to finality we shall have to wait see; but its song Early Roman Kings could spell reaction to reception – and deliberate baiting of classical bardolatry.
The (not-so-very ‘interdisciplinary’) volume is brought to a close by (10) C. Wood's ‘Envoi’.
Now the Yale graduate team of editors (successfully launched since, and now hereby) have made of their baby a challenging prospect as aggiornamento of hot debate over relations between ‘reception’, ‘classical tradition’ and other theory/discipline lobbies. Most clearly, they persua(si)vely merge the Latinising tendency of their collection with distinctively dyed-in-the-Yale critical practice in Early Modern/Renaissance Literature cadres to hit on co-dependent nexus between ‘Philology’ and ‘History’ (p. 6). Wood will nod: that reading produces both ‘their texts then’ and ‘our readings/texts now’ relativistically ain't news (cf. p. 165). But the (starred ‘controversial’, p. 15) postlude wants to close with what is missing from the volume, whereas introduction and introduced manage without. Inter alia that keynote address from C. Martindale teed up punters to put into practice, assuming agreement on ‘Reception between Transmission and Philology’ (the label for papers 2–5 = Part 1), ‘reception as self-fashioning’ (the label for Part 2, or 6–9). The editors make a bee-line for ‘reconciliation’ (p. 8); but that no way represents Charles' style, and, I confess, the appeal of this volume – beyond individual prowess – is exactly the cumulative lapsarian effect that runs dead against the cheerisome front adopted clear across reception studies – as such – where Rule 1. claims valorisation for meanings realised, and the spin tilts correspondingly positive (contrast M. Reeve's ‘pessimism’, p. 8 n. 23).
Three more conference papers besides Martindale's headliner are lost to our reception; Petrarch and Dylan are drafted in from previous publication, loading away from historicising distantiation and reinforcing constructive re-appropriation, besides bridging and pivoting the ensemble around Early Modern heartland, and securing presence (in fact prospect) – with a vengeance. Observe: Cicero rediuiuus a disappointment all round; Horatian Muses better heard read; Servius' way not ours; Scots never would travel; Petrarch's writing to antiquity went unanswered; the drugs don't work any more, Medeas; power languages make subalterns of the occupied; along Highway 61, hillbillies convert to ‘Columbia Recording Artist' folksingers. And finally, the finale (Part 3 = 10) regrets that the volume has passed on the dare it was convoked for, and then launches caelo sereno into a disconnect of wild-Romantic NewEngland/Hellenising claims for ‘truth’ as the quality that makes the classics ‘strong’: ‘the idea that literature once communicated with the gods’ (pp. 168–9). Plus a tailpiece calling for more oomph (‘drama’) in critical response, à la statuary, Warburg on (pp. 171–3).
For sure, everything here clamps ‘reception’ to ruination, and it makes a convincing Latin way to get real with the performativity of transmission/refabrication – sweeping up on desolation row.
