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Backgrounds to English Literature Lecture 18: Roman philosophy =Horace -Another poetic genius of the early Augustan period -Wide-ranging poetic corpus. -The Roman Odes: the finest exposition of the Horatian voice. =Elegist -In contrast to the polymath Horace, a group of poets who were his contemporaries obsessively focused on one kind of poetry: the elegists -Propertius, Tibullus, the rare female poet Sulpicia, and Ovid. -It should not be thought that elegy simply translates real lives wholesale into verse, without the mediation of intertextual erudition and artistry. There is passion and raw emotion, but there is also a strong sense of the role of the love poet as being subject to aesthetic choice. -Roman love elegy had considerable influence over the development of the subjective expression of first-person emotion in poetry: perhaps the defining characteristic of poetry in the modern world. =General overview of Ovid’s amatory works: Amores, Ars amatoria, Remedia amoris -By the time Ovid came to write, the elegiac tradition was already well developed. What he did with the tradition of self-display was to drive it to extremes -“Every lover is a soldier”, Am. 1.9.1): every lover enters into a discourse of erotic imagery in dialogue and in conflict with his society, literary, social, and political. -Ovid’s amatory works put private life on display – or rather, show us how private life is always already on display, a fiction played out for real, a reality fantasized, which are the main issues throughout the Ovidian corpus. -Amores: a collection of short poems playing with the topoi of love elegy: the locked-out lover, the slave go-between, the traditional symptoms of love, the rich rival, the witch-bawd, infidelity, the military, political, and poetic alternatives, and even the occasional successful erotic encounter. -Ars amatoria: a didactic poem in elegiacs which teaches the reader how to be a good lover: how to catch a woman, how to keep her, and (addressed to women) how to catch and keep a man. -Remedia amoris: teaches us how to be good at breaking up. =Fiction and reality, truth and falsehood, secret and public -Constantly to tease the reader over the question of whether he means what he says, whether he is talking about love or about poetry, fiction or reality. -To play with the reader’s desire to know: 1. Book I Elegy V: Corinna in an Afternoon (Amores) “It was hot, and the noon hour had gone by: I was relaxed, limbs spread in the midst of the bed. One half of the window was open, the other closed: the light was just as it often is in the woods, it glimmered like Phoebus dying at twilight, or when night goes, but day has still not risen. Such a light as is offered to modest girls, whose timid shyness hopes for a refuge. Behold Corinna comes, hidden by her loose slip, scattered hair covering her white throat – like the famous Semiramis going to her bed, one might say, or Lais loved by many men. I pulled her slip away – not harming its thinness much; yet she still struggled to be covered by that slip.” 2. The poem plays around with light and half-light, hiding and sight, covering and uncovering. As Corinna teasingly plays at refusing to uncover herself, so Ovid, the poet, plays at refusing to uncover himself, his poetry, his sex, to the reader. 3. The famous covering-cum-pointing gesture of Venus in art -Truth and falsehood, fiction and reality, secrets and publicity, sincerity and pose: these are the concerns of a lover, and are at issue throughout the amatory poetry, for they are central to the project of subjectivity which always raises crucial questions in Augustan poetry. -The refusal to tell secrets, to let us see fully what is going on, the pretence that we are spying on something private; the pretence that we are sneaking a look at something hidden. All these things contribute to creating the poetic and erotic force of love poetry. -Having just told the story of Mars and Venus, in order to encourage lovers to be relaxed about infidelity, Ovid strikes a pose of pious indignation at anyone who would divulge the secrets of the mystery religions: “It’s not credible that Phoebus would kiss Diana that way, but Mars often does that with his Venus. ‘What are you up to?’ I cried, ‘spreading my joys around? I claim jurisdiction over my girl! What’s yours is shared with me, what’s mine with you – Why has some third come into our property?’” =General overview of Roman philosophy -Greek origin: 1. Philosophy had entered Rome as a Greek importation, and those who taught it mainly stemmed from Greece or from still further east of Italy 2. Romans who wished to study philosophy generally travelled to Athens or to other Greek-speaking centres. 3. The formation of Roman philosophy is the process of the gradual adoption and adaptation of Greek philosophical doctrines by Roman authors. -Beginning of Roman philosophy 1. Early in the principate of Augustus, Quintus Sextius founded a school that combined Stoic ethics with such principles of Pythagoreanism, but short-lived. Apart from this, there were no exclusively Roman schools of philosophy, as distinct from the longestablished Academics, Epicureans, and Stoics. 2. Prior to Lucretius and Cicero, there had been no philosophical writings in the Latin vernacular. 3. Early philosophers: 3.1. Lucretius (95–50 bc): Epicurean, On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura), didactic poem 3.2. Cicero (106–43 bc): Academic, Republic (De republica), Laws (De legibus), Stoic Paradoxes (Paradoxa Stoicorum Academica) 3.3. Varro (116–27 bc): Antiochean, On the Latin Language (De lingua Latina) 3.4. Seneca, the younger (ad 1–65): Stoic, Consolations, On Anger (De ira), On the Shortness of Life (De brevitate vitae) -Roles of philosophy in Rome 1. Although few Romans cultivated and wrote philosophy at a high level, their number is counterbalanced by the many whom it touched and influenced vicariously: 1.1. Horace and Virgil had studied philosophy, includes Stoic and Epicurean themes in their verse. 1.2. Augustus, the first Roman emperor, had already found it politic to have a court philosopher, and two centuries later the Stoic Marcus Aurelius would sit on the imperial throne. 3. It is difficult to think of a society where members of the upper class were more generally aware of philosophy than seems to have been the case in Imperial Rome. For some of them, that awareness will have been quite superficial and scarcely positive, but every senator or knight would have known the difference between the values of a Stoic and those of an Epicurean. -Legacy of Roman philosophy: 1. The influence of Cicero and Seneca was enormous on many thinkers from the early Renaissance to the middle of the eighteenth century, outstripping in its general diffusion the impact of even Plato and Aristotle 2. Montaigne’s essays constantly reflect his reading of Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius / Locke drew heavily on Cicero’s On Duties (De officiis) for his political thought / Hume modelled his celebrated Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion on Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods. =Cicero -General overview 1. Self-awareness as a philosopher: his conception of his role as a pioneer Roman philosopher. He adopted that role most insistently in the last two years of his life: “Philosophy [at Rome] has lain dormant up to now, lacking any illumination in Latin. If I, when I was busy, have been of some service to my fellow citizens, I should also, in my leisure, try to help them by casting light on philosophy and advocating it.” (Tusculan Disputations i 5) 2. In that short period (46–44 bc), Cicero wrote well over thirty books. 3. His voluminous philosophical writings range over most of the topics and thinkers that were talking points during the period when he wrote. 4. Cicero’s status as a world-historical figure owes much to his extraordinary combination of rhetoric, politics, and philosophy. -Cicero’s Stoicism over against Epicureanism 1. His position is unequivocally opposed to Epicureanism. 2. The Stoic ethical imprint is unmistakable 3. He disliked the rigidity and technical refinements of Stoicism 4. Yet he strongly approved: philosophy’s focus upon rationality, social obligation and control of the passions. 5. These cardinal features of Stoicism chimed well with his nostalgia for the Roman rectitude he found largely absent from his own times. -Cicero’s Pragmatism over against Idealism 1. In the De republica, criticizing Plato’s utopianism, Scipio Africanus (the main spokesman, the great soldier and statesman) favours a mixed constitution, with an elected meritocracy and a judicial system that emphasizes the equality of all in law. 2. Rather than design an ideal state, Cicero emphasizes pragmatism and the value of checks and balances established over a long period of trial and error, as reflected in Rome’s early struggles and eventual success. 3. In effect, Cicero is defending the mature Roman constitution. 4. The naturalness and necessity of justice for a successful community. That theme is developed, with the help of Stoicism, in the De legibus: “the law is the highest reason, situated in nature, which commands what ought to be done and forbids the opposite. The very same reason, when it has been established and perfected in the human mind, is law.” (i 18) 5. Connections are then drawn between perfected reason, wisdom, natural justice and the divinely directed commonwealth of gods and humans.