JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of California Pressis collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Classical Antiquity. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 62.122.72.16 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 18:28:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsANDREW FELDHERR Nonr inter nota sepulcra: Catullus 101 and Roman Funerary Ritual Catullus' epigram on the death of his brother emphatically situates its audi ences at the performance of a ritual act. "Borne through many lands and many seas, I come, brother, to these sad rites" (advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias, 101.2). Both the demonstrative has and the tense of the main verb adveniol create the impression that the reader is actually present at the moment when the poet makes the final offerings to his brother. But how are we to understand the relation ship between the words the poet addresses to his brother-and simultaneously to the audience that hears or reads the poem as a text-and the ritual performance that provides its dramatic setting? One strategy, which has laid the groundwork for several influential readings of the poem, treats the ritual largely as a foil for the more meaningful communication that is the poem itself. As Quinn puts it, "the poem's strength is due in great part to the delicate balance between the sad, resigned irony with which the poet both accepts and detaches himself from the formal valediction it is his obligation to pronounce ... and the confident assump tion of an understanding between the brothers transcending the inadequacies of the ceremony."2 Here I want to explore the possibility that the funerary rites to which these lines allude can provide a more positive model for how Catullus' poem communicates. Rather than stress the opposition between the expression I am grateful to my anonymous referees and to the editors of this journal for their suggestions and criticisms. The flaws that remain are my own responsibility. 1. So Biondi 1976: 413n. 22, contra Robinson 1965: 62. 2. Quinn 1973: 440, followed by Fitzgerald 1995: 187: "The moment and the place of this poem are full of contradictions, condensed into the final 'hail and farewell,' words that both accompany the ceremony and gesture toward a communication that transcends its inadequate formulae." Fitzgerald later suggests that the poem presents its ritual language as merely "provisional," again a substitute for another form of contact necessarily deferred by the brother's death. Cf. also Biondi 1976: 410.
In his description of the boat race in the fifth book of the "Aeneid", Vergil's comparison of the ships to chariots can be read not only as an allusion to the Homeric model on which the scene is based but also as part of a larger attempt to recast the episode as a contemporary circus spectacle. Like the Augustan circus, Vergil's boat race offers an image of cosmic and political order. However, beyond its symbolic function the Roman circus also played an active role in realizing the hierarchies it depicted by incorporating its spectators into a unified vision of state and universe. So the boat race too, far from constituting a hiatus in the action of the poem, becomes an instrument for the socialization of those who watch it. The spectacle gives its audience a glimpse of the gods in action and of the leadership of Aeneas himself, whose past accomplishments are reflected in the conduct of the captains. Moreover, the careful organization of internal audiences within the narrative allows every spectator to identify with another figure closer to the center of events and, by extension, invites Vergil's own readers to see themselves as participants in the scene. Thus Vergil uses the model of circus spectacle to bridge the gap separating his audience from the epic past by restaging that past in a form that both was a part of the immediate experience of the contemporary Roman and also provided a crucial context for the constitution of Roman civic life.
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