In the conclusion to his ground-breaking study of the relationship between Latin literature and politics in the age of Nero, J.P. Sullivan looked forward to the literature of the Flavian period, offering a broad survey of the leading writers and their political and literary affiliations. His portrait of Statius, written with his typical wit, is distinctly unappealing:But it is to Statius'Silvaeand to ten books of Martial's epigrams that the fastidiously curious turn to discover the sort of praise that the latest and last heir of the Flavian house, though not the modern reader, would find congenial. The longest piece of this kind is Statius' ecphrastic poem on the great equestrian statue of Domitian erected in the Forum Romanum. It was, like the statue, a commissioned piece and was dashed off in less than fortyeight hours …. This poem and theEucharisticon(Silv.4.2) on the great splendour of Domitian's lavish feast to which the poet was invited are adequate illustrations of how far poets were prepared to go in their presumably acceptable adulation. G.W.E. Russell once remarked to Matthew Arnold, ‘Everyone likes flattery; and when it comes to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.’ Statius seems to have anticipated the advice.
No abstract
William Levitan concluded a study of the fourth century poet Optatian with the sentence, ‘The marble bones of Rome itself were chopped for a thousand years to raise the buildings of Europe.’ The theatres, baths and other edifices constructed by the Romans never wholly perished; they served the local populations for centuries as quarries for building materials. The writers of late antiquity treated the Latin literary tradition the same way that later inhabitants treated the ruins of Roman buildings, as a source for appropriate building blocks. The dismemberment of magnificent structures, whether architectural or literary is, to be sure, a kind of vandalism, but perhaps in the post-modern, resource-hungry world of the mid-1990's we can bring ourselves to think of it as something more positive, as an attempt to salvage and recycle valuable material.
When Seneca's Medea flies off in her serpent-drawn chariot, shedding ruin, heartbreak and death and leaving it all behind her on the stage, we are too stunned to wonder where she might be headed. As it turns out, this enterprising exile continued her career with great success in Roman Africa. This essay considers two remarkable Later Roman Medeas: Hosidius Geta's early third (?) century tragedy Medea and Dracontius' late fifth century epyllion Medea. Both were products of the flourishing, experimental, literary culture of Roman Africa that produced such writers as Apuleius, Tertullian, Augustine, Corippus, Martianus and Fulgentius. Although the two poems present radically different heroines, both exhibit the sophisticated allusivity, wordplay and interest in formal structures and rules that characterise Latin literature from Africa. One Medea makes a lethal intervention in Vergilian poetics; the other Medea channels a distinctively Statian Muse.Hosidius Geta's Medea is a short tragedy consisting of eight scenes and three choral songs that recounts the familiar events of Medea's vengeance in an unfamiliar form—it is the first extant example from antiquity of a cento. Mystery shrouds the origins of this Medea—we are unlikely ever to know for certain where, when or by whom it was written. It is probably a late second or very early third century text from Roman Africa. It is first mentioned by Tertullian, who brings it up as an example of the kind of improper manipulation of scripture perpetrated by heretical readers—that is, as a perverted form of reading. Tertullian's digressive expostulation is the first account we have both of Hosidius' Medea and of the cento form, i.e., the creation of poems made entirely from lines or half lines of a master-text. Tertullian's wording, however, implies that his readers will immediately recognise what a cento is, suggesting that this art form had been around for a long time. More interestingly, in light of the later Christian adoption of the cento form, he disapproves of the reading practices their composition implies, and finds Scripture especially vulnerable to such abuse. It is not hard to see why the fundamentalist preacher Tertullian would be alarmed by the poetics of the cento, for centos expose the multivalent nature of language, forcing the reader constantly to focus on the protean ability of words to change their meanings depending on context. To one whose goal is to establish truth according to the authoritative rule of faith, such linguistic play is threatening.
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