This volume is not for those in a hurry. Each of its seven papers requires patience and focus; each is deeply invested in a careful use of traditional philological tools; each gives new readings of old texts, teasing out under-emphasised or unnoticed aspects of the logic and rhetoric of a text as we work through its words and lines; each anchors its readings in historical specifics of the context of production and what knowledge early audiences would bring to the texts. On full display is a shared and acknowledged respect for ‘practical criticism’ – part of what used to be called the ‘Cambridge idiom’ when I was a student (reading, not incidentally, West's Reading Horace). Its virtues are here (e.g. careful attention to the words on the page, their contexts and evocations, as they could have been understood by contemporary audiences) and perhaps, at moments, also the vices to which it has been prone (e.g. a hectoring and strident certainty).
Before the papers the editors come to bat. Wisse's preface gives the circumstances – a commemoration at Newcastle in 2014. (This volume follows other Cambridge Classical Journal supplements in honour of individual scholars: C.O. Brink, E.J. Kenney, J. Diggle.) Wisse also gives a fair characterisation of what is to come: ‘to focus attention on individual Latin texts by a close examination of the words used and, where appropriate, by a detailed investigation of the literary, social and historical contexts in which the texts were produced’. Woodman's personal reminiscence of West's career is replete with appealing anecdotes and is polemical in a way West would have approved – for example, adjacent sentences archly collocating ‘theory’ with ‘poor or pretentious scholarship’. The papers, however, though polemical about particular readings, do not proclaim any general hostility to the many theoretical approaches that have done us all so much good. What follows here is not a summary of the intricate arguments of these complex papers, but a brief note on each.
F. Cairns, ‘Epigrams by Lutatius Catulus (fr. 1) and Callimachus (AP 12.73 = 4 HE)’, opens the collection. Cairns argues that this Callimachean poem, considered the model for Catulus’ six-line epigram, is not necessarily so – the model is some other (perhaps lost) Hellenistic epigram. Cairns combs through the poems (and the scholarship on them), then brings out a layer of legal language in Catulus as ‘an extended secondary metaphor’, resulting in a deeper and more cogent sense of the logical and rhetorical movement of the fragment.
I.M. Le M. Du Quesnay, ‘Contextualising Catullus: a Re-examination of 66.1–14’, uses Catullus as a guide to reconstruct a ‘revised and expanded’ version of Callimachus’ Coma Berenices. Du Quesnay considers what ancient authors or audiences might have had in mind, unravelling misconceptions by taking back-bearings. In this case that means using not only Catullus but Hyginus, Justin, exegetical texts on Callimachus and what we know of Ptolemy III and Berenice's travels, to imagining a version of the Coma. The densely packed parallels make it read like a Cambridge green-and-yellow more than a discursive paper. A favoured rhetorical strategy in his argument is the conditional ‘if x, then y’, which underscores a healthy circumspection. Du Quesnay's rhetoric here acknowledges that in reading ancient texts we often create temporary shelters out of what scattered materials we can find.
Woodman's ‘Vinous Voices: Horace's Ninth Epode’ begins with a careful analysis of what we need to know to create logical coherence between the sections of the poem. Actium is the poem's topic, but the dramatic setting? Woodman presents options, weighs them and gives a reading that makes sense of the swirling political, personal and poetic contexts. On display are the patience and knowledge needed to tease out the subtle movement of the text from line to line, sorting out different voices, using what linguistic resources we can muster: resonant mono- and bi-lingual puns, textual questions, tenses, pronominal orientation etc. Woodman's dismissal of the arguments of others can verge on a zero-sum game, and there is recourse perhaps a bit too much to the always satisfying but ever dangerous rhetorical strategy of ratio et res ipsa. Nevertheless, a fulsome précis of other views and abundant citations scrupulously give a fair picture of what he is disputing.
At the centre of the collection comes a captivating paper, A. Hardie's ‘The Formation of an Augustan Elegist: Empedocles and Propertius’ Monobiblos’. With an abundance that does not seem gratuitous, we are invited to eavesdrop on a multi-party conversation between texts that would have resonated here for contemporary audiences: Horace's Satires, Virgil's Eclogues, Lucretius (e.g. the combination cum tamen) and Ennius, eventually drawing us to Empedocles. While solidly a words-on-the-page, progressive explication, and while the footnotes are dense with parallels and references, Hardie's essay flows well, drawing resonance from micro to macro, replete with historical arguments from word choice to word play. This paper has strength and humility: with phrases such as ‘a potentially useful line of approach’, Hardie first invites, then convinces.
S. Harrison's ‘Horace's Hymn to Bacchus (Odes 2.19): Politics and Poetics’ traces two interrelated threads. Politics: Horace appropriates Bacchus for Augustus – and away from earlier associations with Antony. Poetics: Horace appropriates for his own lyrics a wide poetic range of martial and irenic topics, with a generic flexibility that includes Attic tragedy. (Harrison here evokes his earlier work on ‘generic enrichment’.) While still in the tradition of close reading and still with the focus firmly on a contemporary audience's historical and poetic equipment for understanding, this is a different kind of paper: it is more discursive, with less at the bottom of the page, and reads more as a narrative essay. Harrison's rhetorical strategy is often a salutary ‘yes, and …’: references are not simple, but alembicated through multiple historical associations and multiple poetic texts, some expected (e.g. Euripides’ Bacchae), some probable (e.g. Tibullus 1.7), some possible (e.g. Pacuvius and Accius) and some unabashedly speculative (e.g. ‘lost epic poems about Bacchus’). Along this continuum of precise to imagined reference, Harrison's inferences and speculation are honest: Harrison does not overstate our knowledge or certainty.
The penultimate paper is J. Moles's ‘Romane, memento: Antisthenes, Dio and Virgil on the Education of the Strong’, revised and published posthumously. His clearly sign-posted arguments rest on the rhetoric of lists: selecting, paraphrasing, accumulating, enumerating, then juxtaposing parallels. Moles argues that Aeneid 6.847–53 is Cynic – specifically Antisthenes’ educational doctrine on the education of the strong – and that Dio Chrysostom was aware of this. Moles argues that in Aeneid 6.847–53 Anchises’ ‘fine arts’ evoke Antisthenes’ human education, and the ‘power arts’ evoke Antisthenes’ divine education, then makes the more pointed contention that Virgil claims to encompass both. To Moles the Virgilian passage does not suggest any doubt about Roman power (or art): ‘Virgil is here making the highest possible claims for his epic, imperialist as it is’. In reading Aeneid 6.847–53, Moles is too scornful of ‘further voices’, quoting, then rebuking several proponents of Virgilian doubt with flourishes such as ‘wholly untenable’ and ‘immediately disproves’; he shows no patience for ambivalence or darker echoes. Moles ends by arguing that Dio of Prusa's Thirteenth Oration takes Antisthenes and Virgil into account, but that ‘Dio's attempt to re-establish some distance between Antisthenes and Roman power was both a noble and a clever move, but, alas, a futile one’.
The last paper may be the strongest: B. Gibson's ‘Hildebert of Lavardin on the monuments of Rome’. Gibson gives a persuasive explication of two poems, bringing out Hildebert's evocation of Lucan, Virgil and Horace (and then Magister Gregorius’ later evocation of Hildebert), but all the while noting how these multiple, layered and subtle evocations function in Hildebert's own poetics. Gibson's method and rhetoric invite us to join in this reading by showing what we gain thereby in a more sophisticated reading of Hildebert, beyond Quellenforschung. On display are the virtues of practical criticism and traditional philology, without the strident certainties or distracting reprimands that are sometimes its attendants.
Though this may seem special pleading, I am surprised that in these seven papers there is no engagement with metre and rhythm (beyond a couple of brief asides), since West's ear for Latin was well-tuned. There were opportunities – for example in Horace Odes 2.19 the rhythm of one line (5) stands out from the rest, closing with two staccato accents at light syllables, and seems expressive: eúhoe, recénti || méns trépidat métu. I missed an engagement with rhythm and metre in a volume so scrupulous about the tools ancient audiences would use when reading poems.
These papers do not engage with new methodologies, but that is appropriate in a volume for David West. They do, however, alter, adjust, sharpen or deepen our interpretations of texts, based on careful use of old ways of looking at things. This would not have been uncongenial to the honorand. Readers will learn much about the specific texts treated, but, in addition, the papers are models of useful and intelligent application of close reading using traditional philological tools, unearthing buried echoes and evocations, whether these are historical circumstance, prior texts or intellectual contexts and associations that would have been part of the equipment for reading of contemporary audiences.
