In a paper published nearly fifty years ago, Piero Scazzoso traced what he took to be a pattern of mystery allusions in the Georgics. Reflections of telestic initiation and allied concepts of resurrection and salvation were then identified in the Orpheus and Aristaeus episodes in Book 4. Later studies in this area focused variously on the first proem, on Eleusinian references in the ‘farmer's arma’ (1.162–8), on the role of Proserpina, and on the ‘mystic’ beatitudes at the end of the second book. Most recently, Llewelyn Morgan has offered an analysis of the relevance of mystery cult to understanding Vergil's conception of the physical universe and its underlying principles, again with particular reference to the fourth book.With the benefit of this considerable body of work, we are well placed to ask whether Roman readers' understanding of the poem could have been enriched by acquaintance with telestic concepts and procedures. Christine Perkell detected the ‘primacy of mystery’ in the tension between the poet's didactic praecepta and his aspiration to god given knowledge, a reading which might encourage more extended enquiry into the revelatory character of the Georgics.
In Juvenal's third satire the main speaker, Umbricius, delivers a speech of farewell (a syntacticon) as he prepares to leave Rome. In it, he mounts a sustained attack on life in the capital. By contrast, he praises Italian country towns, a combination of laudatio and vituperatio which is foreshadowed in the prefatory praise of provincial Cumae (2–5) and denigration of Rome (5–9).
This chapter examines the role of music in mystery cults. Looking at relationships between the Muses, Orpheus, Dionysus, and initiation rites such as those at Eleusis, it argues that choreia was an essential component in bringing about that contact with the divine which initiands sought. Also significant is the fact that Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses, plays an important part in the eschatology of mystery religions, thus establishing a link between immortality in Muse-inspired poetry and the blessed afterlife promised by initiation. The chapter further argues that mousike in such cults was understood to contain cosmic and eschatalogical symbolism through which the harmony of the cosmos could be revealed. Hence, poetic claims to divine wisdom inspired by the Muses should not be regarded merely as metaphor: the boundaries between the ‘sacral’ and the ‘literary’ were less clear-cut than is commonly supposed.
The Aedes Herculis Musarum (AHM), embodying musical harmony, was a symbolic focal point for political concordia at Rome. The treatment of its cult honorands in high poetry also embraces Juno Regina, whose contemporary temple was adjacent to the AHM. Juno (as Moneta) and the Muses are further associated in the function of "memory," and Juno, when offended, is susceptible to musical propitiation. The AHM is prominently identified with concord and Junonian reconciliation at the end of the Fasti, and in the Aeneid, Vergil evokes his Muse's Roman cult identity in exploring Juno's hostility towards the "Herculean" Aeneas, as also when he foreshadows her assent to the existence of Rome.
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