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Clay, D. (1998) The Theory of The Literary Persona in Antiquity - MD 40, Pp. 9-40
Clay, D. (1998) The Theory of The Literary Persona in Antiquity - MD 40, Pp. 9-40
Clay, D. (1998) The Theory of The Literary Persona in Antiquity - MD 40, Pp. 9-40
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an ancient poet's poetry we hve very little to guide us in envisaging an individuai poet's life. Even philosophers, who
spoke in the first person, were not exempt from this mode of
reading. Heraclitus died buried in a dng heap because he said
that a corpse should be dumped out more quickly than a
chamber pot13. Empedocles leaped into Aetna as he is made
to die by his own words14. Such readings are inspired by a vision of philology as biography and what might be called the
cult of personality. Its enterprise is most forcefully articulated
by its greatest modern practitioner, Ulrich von Wilamowitz
Moellendorff, writing in the age of Stephan Georg and
Friedrich Gundolf:
The biographerproceeds from work to work, from interprtationto
interprtation,always seeking the author behind the book. If a human being stands out whom we can recognize as such, if th individuai featuresunite themselves into a single portrait which as a unit is
crdible, the task of the philologist is accomplished15.
This is from the Introduction to Wilamowitz' Piato, a writer
who never (except in his letters) spoke in his own person. I
give Wilamowitz' summation of the attitude we hve briefly
surveyed in the translation of Harold Cherniss, who was, in
1943, one of the first Classicists to challenge the biographical
fashion of literary criticism. Eric Havelock had preceded him
in 1938 in his The Lyric Genius of Catullus16.But in their vigorous protests neither Cherniss nor Havelock were con13. As was made clear by Hermann Fraenkel, Thought atterri in Heraditus,
Am. Journ. Phil. 59, 1938, pp. 309-314.
14. The words of Diels, Vorsokr. 31B115. A biographical reading whose source
is nicely illustrated by Ava Chitwood, The Death of Empedocles, Am. Journ.
Phil. 107, 1986, pp. 175-191. The biographical lens transforme Pausanias, the addressee of Empedocles' On Natura, into his young lover (D.L. 8,60). Dirk Obbink has provided the first careful study of Empedocles* multiple addressees in
Mega Nepios, pp. 51-92.
15. Piato: Sein Leben und Seine Werke,3Berlin, 1929, p. 8, trans. Harold Cherniss, Me ex versiculis meis parum pudicum, University of California Publications
in Classical Philology 12, 1943, pp. 279-292 (reprinted by J. P. Sullivan, Criticai
Essays on Roman Literature, Cambridge, Mass. 1962, pp. 15-30). Wilamowitz
first published his Platon in 1918.
16. The Canons of Catuan Criticism, in The Lyric Genius of Catullus, Oxford,
1938, pp. 73-86.
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2. Poets, actors, and their masks
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from two Greek texts of the fourth Century . C, Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Poetics. The distinction Piato and Aristotle draw between a poet himself and his characters is not
exactly new. It is strikingly prsent in fourth Century dedicatory reliefs and the familir scene of the tragic or comic poet
contemplating th masks of his repertory. So far as the audience is concerned, the more fundamental distinction is between th actor and th character he plays. This distinction is
illustrated in the fragment of the mid-fourth Century Gnathia
krater from Taranto now in the Martin von Wagner Museum
in Wrzburg (Figure 1). Hre a tragic actor with a stubble
beard and close cropped hair and in costume contempltes the
mask of the Thracian king whose character he will play. In the
Peiraeus actors relief (Figure 2), which is perhaps contemporary with Euripides' Baccbae, the distinction between the
poet, his actors, and their masks is clear and indelible. The
heroized poet sits on a couch holding a rhyton in his left
hand. He contempltes three actors. One carries a mask; one
holds up a tympanon, and the figure closest to the poet seems
to be playing the rle of a woman. The fragment of a relief of
the comic poet in Lyme Park from c. 380 (Figure 3) shows a
seated comic poet (possibly Aristophanes) contemplating two
comic masks and silently and eloquently pointing to the distinction Piato was making at about the same time28.This relief
has a striking and developed parallel in the marble relief of the
first Century A. D. now in the British Museum. This shows a
comic poet, who turns from his banquet couch to greet
Dionysos and his retinue. The scene indicates a festival. Below the couch and table of the reclining and garlanded poet is
a ehest containing four comic masks29.These distinctions are
made without words. The Gnathia crater shows a tragic actor
contemplating his mask. The relief at Lyme Park shows a
28. The first two illustrations can be conveniently found in Arthur PickardCambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens2, Oxford 1968, Figures 51 (Peiraeus relief) and 54a (Gnathia crater at Wrzburg); the Lyme Park relief is
shown as Figure 201 (page 48) of Margarete Bieber's The History of the Greek
and Roman Theater2, Princeton 1961.
29. An illustration can be found in Richard Green and Eric Handley, Images of
the Greek Theater, Austin 1995, Figure 44 (p. 73). The relief might hve an original in the second Century . C. The fact that comedy and tragedy were masked
drama has a crucial bearing on the practice of both tragedy and comedy. For this
Helene P. Foley's The Masque of Dionysus, Trans. Proc. Am. Phil. Ass. 110,
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comic poet and his masks, which signify his actors as they
wear these masks;the Peiraeusactors relief shows a poet, gazing at his actors, who carry their masks. AU are distinct, yet
associated. In the Wrzburg crater the poet is only implied.
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Resp. 3,393A. Homer himself, or his narrative voices and modes,
is the object of the study of Scott Richardson, The Homenc Narrato^ Nashville,
1990.
33.
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34.
,
Resp. 3,393C-D.
These are:
1 3,1448*19-22
.
Kassel:
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enee for dramaticor mimetic poetry35.He establishes a threefold distinction among th subjects, medium, and style of imitative poetry. As for style, a poet can imitate th same subjects
in th same medium, but in diffrent modes. That is, a poet
represents heroes (subject), in the dactylic hexameter
(medium), in three diffrent modes: 1 as a narratorwho assumes no other rle than that of narrator;2 as the narrator
when he assumes the rle of his characters,as does Homer;
and 3 as a poet who represents (for he can no langer impersonate) the men who are the objects of his imitation in action
- obviously the case of drama.This, at least, is how I interpret
Aristotle's meaning in his third distinction.
Aristotle returns to thse distinctions as he characterizes
Homer as not only a serious poet who wrote well, but as a serious poet who was in some sens a dramatist (Poetics
4.1448b32-36). In one last comment on the epic (Poetics
24.1460a5-ll), Aristotle praises Homer again for his dramatic
rejection of his narrativeself - that is, for his rcognition of
not write) himself: The
what the poet should do (,
poet himself should speak as little as possible. For in this, he is
not an imitator ().
Now, other poets dramatize themselves throughout their entire recitations. But seldom and in
only a few cases are they imitators. But, when he has recited
his short proem [Iliad 1.1-17, exactly the passage Socratesadduces in Republic3], Homer immediatelyintroduces a man or
and none of them out
a woman or some other character()
of characterbut ail are convincing. What is striking about ail
,
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2 4,1448b32-36
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3 24,146035-11:
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35. Yet a prfrence for the dramatic mode of discourse is expressed in Adeimantos* unexpected prfrence for the pure imitator of a dcent character
(Resp. 3,397D), a prfrence that seems quite forgotten in the remarks that open
Republic 10.
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from his text. Rather, the image of the rhapsode stands before
Aristotle as he appeared,like Plato's Ion of Ephesos, in the
festivals of Athens and dramaticallyrecited, with staff in hand
and in his magnificent costume, th narrativesections of the
Iliad and Odyssey and played the parts of Chryses and
Agamemnon41.Aristotle could envisage the early tragedians
not as authors remote from the texts they had created but as
acting in the dramas they had composed. Unlike Aristotle,
Piato glimpsed and hinted at the possiblility that the poet
could conceal or disguise himself in his characters,as he did
himself in his purely dramatic dialogues (Republic
3,393C11).
3. The poet and his page
The Roman situation is diffrentfrom the Greek, but both the
Greek and Roman situations are very diffrent from our own
exprience as silent readers of closet poetry and prose. The
change is already evident in the Centuryafter Aristotle. Poseidippos, in the poem Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones has called his seal,
expresses the wish that he will survive as a statue in the agora
of Pella, unrollinga book. If the seated statue of a poet with
a papyrus roll in th Stanza delle Statue of the Vatican represents Poseidippos of Pella and not Poseidippos of Kassandreia, the contrast with the seated statue of Archilochos in
the Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek is striking. The archaicpoet is
intensely engaged in the performanceof his poetry; the Hellenistic poet languidly holds a book roll in his right hand42.
The advent of literacy and the book and the development of
41. Such a performance is vividly evoked by John Herington, Poetry into
Drama: Early Tragedy and the Greek Poetic Tradition, Berkeley, 1985, pp.
10-15.
42. Supplementun Hellenisticum, d. H. Lloyd Jones and P. Parsons, Berlin and
New York, 1983, 705. The poem is well treated by Lloyd-Jones in The Seal of
Posidippus, Journ. Hell. Stud. 83, 1983, pp. 75-99 (The Acadmie Papers of Sir
Hugh Lloyd-Jones: Greek Comedy, Hellenistic Literature, Greek Religion, and
Miscellanea, Oxford, 1990, pp. 158-195). As for his statue, Matthew Dickie has
made a convincing case for removing it from the comic poet from Kassandreia
and giving it to Posidippus of Pella, the epigrammatist, Which Posidippus?, Gk.
Rom. Byz. Stud. 35, 1994, pp. 373-383. For Poseidippos, see the documentation in G. M. A. Richter, Portraits of the Greeks, London 1965, vol. 2, pp. 238-
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libraries changea the fundamental conditions of poetic production, just as it radicallytransformedthe relation between a
poet and his audience. The term audience is ambiguous,
now that we have lost its original meaning. Horace, for example, can say of Homer that he transportshis audience into the
middle of his narrative(in mdias res ... auditorem rapit), but
he does so in a verse epistle addressedto the Pisones (Ars Poetica 148-149) of which they were not auditores but lectores.
Smith Palmer Bovie's translation of auditorem as readeris
inaccurateto the social context of Horace, in which poetry
was read aloud; it is also a symptom of our ge of literacy43.
Roman readers performed the poetry they read, and poetry
continued to be recited before small groups and performed
before large groups. We are reminded of this by the funerary
monument of Q. Sulpicius Maximus who recited Greek poetry at th Capitoline contest of 94 A. D. at the ge of eleven
(Figure 4). Although he holds a papyrus roll in his left hand,
he does not read from it44.On the left edge of the deep niche
in which he stands is inscribed the Greek text of th poem he
recited, which would have been read aloud - if discretely - by
a few of the passers-by on the Via Salaria.But, as for what
both Piato and Aristotle refer to as the poet himself,the papyrus rle or parchmenttransformsthe dramaticprsence of
th performer into a text, or, nostalgically, in the cases of
Martial'sapophoreta>into the painted portrait of the poet as
the frontispiece to a prsentationcopy of his book of poetry.
By metonymy the writer is transformedinto the book itself.
In a prsentation copy, Livy is reduced to small characters
239 (Figs. 1647-1650); for Archilochos (who I take to be Archilochos), vol. 1,
pp. 66-67 (Figs. 231-232).
43. The Satires and Epistles of Horace, Chicago 1959, p. 277.
44. Rome, Museo Nuovo Capitolino, illustration from The Cambridge History
of Classical Literature II: Roman Literature, Cambridge 1982, Plate II. According to the inscription, the young Quintus' performance was spontaneous this we can doubt - and his thme (Zeus's rebuke to Helios for giving the reigns
of his chariot to his son) was suggested by his audience. The Greek text of his 43
line epyllion is inscribed on the left edge of the large aitar in which he is sculpted
in deep relief, IGUR 1336 Moretti. Covering the large subject of literacy and
performance are E. J. Kenney's chapter on Books and readers in the Roman
world, Cambridge History of Classical Literature II, pp. 3-32 and its counterpart
in Bernard Knox's Books and readers in the Greek World, The Cambridge History of Classical Literature I: Greek Literature, Cambridge 1985, pp. 1-41.
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signs of a licentious life in OvicTs amatory poetry. To this severe and censorious mode of interprtation Ovid protests in
his long letter of apology to Augustus. Here is the disclaimer
that most concerns us (Tristia 2,353-60):
355
360
50. Paley and Stone, M. Valent Martialis Epigrammata Selecta, London 1868,
quoted in Peter Howell in A Commentary on Book One of the Epigrams of Martial, London 1980, p. 116. Howell also calls attention to Martial 11.15.13 (mores
non habet hic meos libellus) and Pliny's statement of the law (legem) Catullus
expressed with violence in e. 16 (Letter 4,14,5). His other rfrences are equally
relevant. Apuleius recalls Hadrian's epitaph on the poet Voconius (Uscivus
versHymente pudicus eras) in Apology 11. Only the censorious critics insist on a
biographical reading of poetry, as does Seneca, EpistuUe 114,3. On the Greek
side there is the obscne and late iambic poem in Cod. Vat. Barb. gr. 69 f.lO4r
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4. Personae
The indignant language of Catullus, Ovid, and Martial is not
our own. They contrasted the poet himself in his life outside
of his poetry with his poetry - versiculi,liber, or pagina. The
word persona in our literary sens of the term occurs only in
late authors such as Diomedes and Servius. One of the well
attested meanings of persona is that of a falsely assumed character or pretense (Giare, OLD 2d.)51.Persona in the sens of a
character introduced into a poem does occur in rhetorical
writings. In describingthe narrativeand didactic mode of poetry, the grammarianDiomedes (4th CenturyA. D.) claims
that in this mode: the poet speaks himself without the intervention of another persona (or character),as is the case of the
first three books of the Georgics and the beginning of the
fourth [up to the dramaof the epyllion of Aristaeuswhich begins at 321] and the poem of Lucretius and other similar
poems52.
Diomedes was not a careful reader of Lucretius, but his
termpersona supplies th word that has been missing from the
theory of the genres of poetic prsentation as it was established by Piato. One can put the situation in terms of a paradox: strictly narrativeand third person poetry is personal in
which ends by proclaiming that th poet's life and Muse are chaste (16-17),
lamb et Elegi Graeci2 vol. 1, Archilochus 328 West.
51. In Lucretius, persona is both a mask (th creta persona of 4,297) and a social
pretense, that can be unmasked: eripiturpersona, manet res, 3,58. In Martial, Epigrams 3,43, we find this same sens of persona:
Mentiris iuvenem tinctis, Laetine, capillis.
iam subito corvus, qui modo cycnus eras.
non omnes fallis; seit te Proserpina canum:
personam capiti detrahet illa tuo.
Martial's phrase in the last line seems an allusion to the Lucilius of Horace, who
strips the victims of his satire of their skin (detrahere et pellem, Horace, Satires
II 1,64). res, 3,58. In Martial, Epigrams 3,43, we find this same sens of persona:
The character of the social persona is best described by Cicero in his De Officiis,
especially 1,107-121. This, of course, leads directly to the conception of all human life as a play, documented in E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the
Latin Middle Ages [1948], trans. Willard R. Trask, New York 1953, pp.
138-144.
52. exegeticon est vel enarrativum, in quo poeta ipse loquitur sine ullius personae
interlocutione, ut se habent trs Georgia et prima pars quartiy item Lucreti carmina et cetera his similia, Diomedes, Keil, Gramm. Lat. vol. 1, p. 482.20:
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For Proclus in the scholia of the mss. of Hesiod's Work and Days, see A. Pertusi
in Aevum 25, 1951, pp. 147-179, Scholia Vetera in Hesiodi Opera et Dies, Milan
1955, and M. L. West's discussion, Hesiod: Works and Days (note 2 above), pp.
68-70.
57.
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62. In Socrates' conceit, Ion 533D-E. At the conclusion of this essay, begun as I
investigateci the context in which Lucretius* Memmius might be regarded as a
rhetorical persona, I would like to thank Richard Lamberton for advice on an
early version; Elizabeth Asmis for advice on a still later version; and Graziano
Arrighetti for prompting me to enlarge my horizons in this last and necessarily
elliptical version.