Writing, Performance, and Authority in Augustan Rome

Abstract

This book examines how the Romans conceived of their poetic media. Song has links to the divine through prophecy, while writing offers a more quotidian, but also a more realistic way of presenting what a poet does. In a culture of highly polished book production where recitation was the fashion, to claim to sing or to write was one means of self-definition. This book examines the stakes of literary claims to one medium or another. Generic definition is an important factor. Epic and lyric have traditional associations with song, while the literary epistle is obviously written. But issues of interpretability and power matter even more. Vergil's Sibyl resists the submission to the divine that song entails and would rather write up her prophecies, but the winds blow these around and make them uninterpretable. Song has advantages, but comes at a price. The choice of medium contributes to the debate about the relative potency of rival discourses, specifically poetry, politics, and the law. Writing offers an out from the social and political demands of the moment by shifting the focus toward the readership of posterity. This book fills two needs in the scholarship by focusing on the importance of the media in literary and political self-definition during this period and by providing an account of Augustan literature in its cultural setting. Speech act theory provides a tool for analyzing the interrelation of writing, utterance, and performativity.

INCREDVLVS ODI: HORACE AND THE SUBLITERARY AESTHETIC OF THE AUGUSTAN STAGE

“…Similarly Libanius, in the fourth century CE and in a treatise in defence of the genre, 77 Cf. Lowrie (2009) Assuming that this is so, and if I am right to detect pantomime's performative coding in the cultural weave of lines 182-8, how can we explain Horace's dive into 80 Albeit adding that this is of little consequence, for the only thing that matters to pantomime fans is the quality of the dancer's performance, which the songs are meant to support (Or.…”

“…1.10.73 neque te ut miretur turba labores (‘do not strive to be admired by the crowd’). On Horace as ‘an elitist’, see Lowrie (2009) 257. More generally on Horace's fear of vulgarisation, see Feeney (2002) and (2009).…”

“…79Cf. Lowrie (2009) 255 on the very similar issues arising from Horace's Letter to Augustus ( Epist . 2.1).…”

ON HORACE'S PYRAMIDS (C. 3.30.1–2)

“…monumentum 2, 4, 5. On the double meaning, see Fowler (2000) 197–8; Lowrie (2009) 117–22, with bibliography. For monumentum in the sense of a multi-volume literary work, see e.g.…”

The Muse at Play: An Introduction

“…6.77-82 + 98-103], perhaps the most phonologocentric passage of Latin literature, song is not the be-all and end-all of communication", she writes, and "[w]ith few exceptions, Vergil … comments [only] indirectly on the relative validity of song and writing through the passages on the Sibyl" (4). To this I would add that there is an interesting tension here between inspired poet and inspired prophetess: it is Vergil who is the authorial force behind the visible, written acrostic, which the Sibyl, because she is speaking when "she would much rather do her job via writing" (Lowrie 2009: 5), is not quite in a position to produce herself. 32 See Gowers 2005: 179-181 and passim on the proliferation of mouths in Vergil's Underworld and the relationship of these oral cavities to the Sibyl's many-mouthed pronouncements; see also Monti 1994: 25-26 andpassim andOliensis 2004: 41-42 and passim.…”