BMCR 2009.04.18: O'Rourke on Cairns, Papers on Roman Elegy: 1969-2003. Eikasmos. Studi; 16

Francis Cairns, Papers on Roman Elegy: 1969-2003. Eikasmos. Studi; 16.
Bologna:  Pa\tron, 2007.  Pp. viii, 483.  ISBN 9788855529662.  [euro
]35.00.

Reviewed by Donncha O'Rourke, Trinity College Dublin ([email protected])
Word count:  2875 words
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This Eikasmos volume assembles over thirty separate studies on
Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid written by Francis Cairns over a
thirty-five year period and published in seven different countries in
the form of book chapters, conference papers, contributions to
Festschrifts, and articles in academic journals. Many of these are
derived from mainstream publications, but the volume also provides a
valuable service in making accessible several papers of more obscure
provenance. A table of its contents will give a preliminary impression
of the interests of the collection and specify the elegies principally
discussed:


1: Some Observations on Propertius 1.1
2: AP 9,588 (Alcaeus of Messene) and nam modo in Propertius
1,1,11
3: The Milanion/Atalanta exemplum in Propertius 1,1: uidere feras
(12) and Greek Models
4: Two Unidentified Komoi of Propertius. I 3 and II 29
5: Propertius 1,4 and 1,5 and the 'Gallus' of the Monobiblos
6: Some Problems in Propertius 1.6
7: Rhetoric and Genre: Propertius 1.6.31-6, Menander Rhetor 398.29-32
-399.1, and
a Topos of the Propemptikon
8: Notes on Propertius 1.8
9: Love at the Seaside: Propertius (1,11), Cynthia, and Baiae
10: Lesbia Mentoreo (Propertius 1,14,2)
11: Propertius i.18 and Callimachus, Acontius and Cydippe
12: Propertius on Augustus' Marriage Law (II 7)
13: Further Adventures of a Locked-out Lover: Propertius 2.17
14: Propertius 2.19.32
15: Propertius 2.23 and its Final Couplet (23-4)
16: Propertius 2.29A
17: Propertius, 2.30 A and B
18: Propertius the Historian (3.3.1-12)?
19: Propertius 3.4 and the Aeneid incipit
20: Propertius 3,10 and Roman Birthdays
21: Propertius and the Battle of Actium (4.6)
22: Propertius 4.9: "Hercules Exclusus" and the Dimensions of Genre
23: Allusions to hunc...meum esse aio in Propertius?
24: The Etymology of Militia in Roman Elegy
25: Ancient 'Etymology' and Tibullus: on the Classification of
'Etymologies' and on
'Etymological Markers'
26: Tibullus, Messalla, and the Spica: 1.1.16; 1.5.28; 1.10.22, 67;
2.1.4;
2.5.84
27: Tibullus1,8,35f. and a Conventional Ancient Gesture
28: Tibullus 2.1.57-8: Problems of Text and Interpretation
29: Tibullus 2.2
30: Tibullus 2.6.27-42: Nemesis' Dead Sister
31: Imitation and Originality in Ovid Amores 1.3
32: Ovid Amores 1.15 and the problematic fruges of line 25
33: Self-Imitation within a Generic Framework. Ovid, Amores 2.9 and
3.11
and the renuntiatio amoris
34: The 'Etymology' in Ovid Heroides 20.21-32

Naturally, a collection such as this does not set out to be a
cover-to-cover read, but comprises instead an array of generally
independent (rather than interdependent) studies. Short notes (paper 19
is the shortest at 2 pages) rub shoulders with hefty investigations
(paper 21 spans 41 pages); the average length of paper is 13 pages. The
volume is weighted two-thirds in favour of Propertius, with the
remaining third shared more or less evenly by Tibullus and Ovid.
Despite these disparities, the volume achieves formal cohesion through
its harmonization of the diverse stylistic conventions of the original
publications, and by its provision of an overarching bibliography and
indices. Thematic cohesion is suggested not only by the volume's focus
on the Augustan elegists, but also by the sequential arrangement of its
papers according to poet and poem (beginning with Propertius 1.1 and
ending, 450 pages later, with Ovid, Heroides 20), and in particular by
the unwavering tenacity with which Cairns pursues his lines of inquiry
over the three-and-a-half decades encompassed by the volume (e.g. paper
2, published in 1987, defends and supplements paper 1, published in
1974); indeed, the arrangement of articles according to the chronology
of ancient poets rather than of modern publications has the effect of
implying the consistency, rather than the evolution, of Cairns's ideas.


As well as making a statement, or statements, about Latin elegy,
therefore, the collection also offers a diachronic overview of Cairns's
substantial scholarship on Latin elegy to date. The size of the volume
records a formidable achievement in terms of sheer output alone,
especially given that its contents were produced together with more
than three times as many articles again on diverse Greek and Latin
literary and historical subjects, and alongside four books which have
been of considerable importance to professional classicists. Many of
the papers reproduced here seem propaedeutic to, or 'spin-offs' from
these larger works, in particular Generic Composition in Greek and
Roman Poetry (Edinburgh, 1972), but also Tibullus: A Hellenistic Poet
at Rome (Cambridge, 1979) and Sextus Propertius: The Roman Elegist
(Cambridge, 2006), the latter published just three years after the most
recent article on Propertius in this volume (paper 19, published in CQ
in 2003). Several of the articles seem to take up and expand on
minutiae which did not make their way into these larger and more
mainstream publications, reserved instead for journals that (used to)
presuppose a readership soundly-trained in Greek and Latin, and already
initiated in the rigours of classical philology. Hence, the reader will
often find obscure texts quoted at length (but not in the main
translated) to illuminate those of greater renown, also the technique
on which Generic Composition depends in its elucidation of Greek and
Latin poetry from the perspective of Menander Rhetor, a household name
among Classicists only after 1972.

Composed mainly of specialist studies, the volume generally demands
more than cultivates a reader compliant with the rigorous analytical
strategies more patiently set out in Cairns's full-scale works. A
reader uninitiated in literary analysis according to 'generic
composition' would (if reading sequentially) encounter three articles
dependent on the technique (see pp. 16-20, 35-58, 61-8) before
inferring from paper 7 (a defence, entrusted to Studi Italiani di
Filologia Classica, of Generic Composition from its detractors some
twenty years after its publication) that by 'genre' Cairns means not
(as most Classicists do) genres of form (such as epic or elegy), but
genres of content (i.e. rhetorical type-situations such as the
propemptikon, the 'send-off', or praecepta amoris, 'instructions in
love') composed and by strong poets varied, for inclusion within any of
the formal genres, according to strict prescriptions evolved (so Cairns
postulates) in the rhetorical schools of Greece and Rome, now preserved
in the third-century (A.D.) treatise of Menander Rhetor (see also p.
423, n. 2). Some have objected that this approach coldly divorces Latin
poetry from Roman life by forcing 'delightful poem[s] onto a
Procrustean bed', or that it puts the rhetorical cart before the poetic
horse by awarding primacy to compositional prescriptions rather than to
the poetry composed, or, more fundamentally, that it assumes the rules
governing ancient rhetoric and poetry were the same (though the
possibility of a distinction here is invoked on p. 229 to allow Cairns
some flexibility).[[1]]

Nevertheless, generic composition has been as influential as it has
been controversial, and most classicists work with the spirit if not
always the letter of its approach.[[2]] The chief significance of
generic analysis is that it militates against the kind of face-value
biographical readings of elegy that were rife when Generic Composition
was first published; and yet, paradoxically, Cairns remains to this day
a scholar more likely than most to draw biographical conclusions from
his readings of Latin poetry: for example, whereas the current trend is
to see the reader rather than the poet as the constructor of political
or any other meaning, Cairns's paper 21 defends Propertius 4.6 as a
straightforward eulogy of Augustus and his role at Actium by projecting
the poem onto Menander's prescription for a 'mythic hymn' in honour of
Apollo with an embedded 'ecphrasis of a sea-battle'; conversely, when
paper 30 concludes that Tibullus' lines on Nemesis' dead sister are
epigrammatic, i.e. literary rather than biographical, but that her
description as sanguinolenta ('bloodied', Tib. 2.6.40) is derived from
Tibullus' real-life experience of military medicine in the legions,
Cairns eschews the preference of his followers to see our access to all
aspects of the ancient world (including Tibullus' military career) as
always already mediated by their construction in literary discourse
(e.g. in the Suetonian Vita as much as in Tibullus 1.10).

While focussing on the canon of Latin elegists, the attention
frequently given to fragmentary or extra-canonical texts exhibits
learning of far wider embrace, of a kind indispensible to the questions
Cairns seeks to answer, and characteristic of the ways in which he
answers them. These are not always the kind of questions which readers
of Latin elegy (these days) tend to ask in the first instance, but they
are questions to which experts and devotees (even these days) must
ultimately return. For instance, and in line with the predilection of
the Eikasmos series for textual criticism, many of Cairns's articles
are concerned, sometimes primarily (as in papers 2, 8, 17, and 28) but
more often as an attendant argument or conclusion, with the notorious
cruces in the transmitted texts of the elegists, amongst which the
Propertian corpus has been particularly unfortunate. In the vast
majority of cases, Cairns's purpose is to conserve the textus receptus
and thereby (even if, as he admits, in vain) defend it from a modern
generation of "imprudent tamperers" (197). Where other textual critics
have sought to smooth over rough diction through emendation, Cairns
seeks to diminish the appearance of the roughness itself: suspect
poem-structures are justified on the basis of genres of content (e.g.
articles 4 and 13 read Propertius 2.29 and 2.17 respectively as komoi,
and defend their unity and transmitted sequence on that basis; article
33 defends Amores 2.9 as a unified renuntiatio amoris), while
individually dubious words are defended on the basis of parallels in
technical, often legal, jargon (papers 14, 15, 16, and 23) or
etymological play (paper 32), or via what might now (but not in 1979)
be termed intratextuality (paper 33, where the retention of Tibullus'
repeated hircus at 2.1.58 also necessitates what for Cairns is a rare
emendation, of oves to opes, in the same line), or via allusion
to/intertextuality with other poetic models (e.g. papers 2 and 28),
sometimes reconstructed in absentia (as in articles 1, 3, and 31).

Importantly in this last regard, the appearance of Cornelius Gallus
throughout the volume (especially in papers 3, 5, 24, and 31) reminds
us that, after D. O. Ross' Backgrounds to Augustan Poetry (Cambridge,
1975), Cairns has done more than possibly any other scholar to take
into account, and to reconstruct, a conspicuously missing link in our
understanding of Latin elegy. Similarly, paper 11, the earliest in the
collection, opens a debate which Cairns has subsequently revisited,
namely the influence on subjective Latin elegy of Hellenistic narrative
elegy (in this instance, through a comparison of Propertius 1.18 and
Aristaenetus' paraphrase of Callimachus' Acontius and Cydippe).[[3]] No
reader of these papers can fail to appreciate that Hellenistic models,
especially Callimachus, loom large in Latin elegy, even (contrary to
some opinions) from its earliest surviving collection in Propertius'
Monobiblos.[[4]] The fragmentary nature of these models combined with
their often esoteric interests makes for challenging papers (see, for
example, paper 10, tracing at Propertius 1.14.12 the palimpsest of a
Hellenistic paradoxographical zetema), and readers may find Cairns's
close readings more often taxing than not, as page after page parades
with relentless inclusivity Cairns's keen eye for detail (e.g. pp.
434-5 ask the reader to take on ten intertextual co-ordinates in the
space of fifteen lines of discussion; see also the microscopic links
posited between Propertius 1.4 and 1.5 in paper 5); it is in general
their comprehensiveness as much as, if not more than, their detail that
gives these papers their cogency, as Cairns perhaps recognises in paper
23: "[t]he passages discussed below present gradations in closeness to
the claim -- from the quasi-formulaic to the somewhat nebulous. Hence,
although the outcome of the discussion is on the whole fairly positive,
it involves different degrees of conviction; and indeed the less robust
examples require support from the more robust" (289).

Nevertheless, as if following the structure of a subjective elegy,
Cairns always states his case clearly at beginning and end, and evolves
its complexity in the centre. A representative example of what Cairns
does best is provided by paper 25, a magisterial treatise on
etymological wordplay hailing from PCPS 42 (1996) and building on
Robert Maltby's A Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies (ARCA 25, Leeds
1991) as well as on Cairns's own earlier interests in this area (see
paper 24 in this volume and chapter 4 of his Tibullus): aiming to
sensitise Latinists, especially commentators, to the high-density
etymologising of Augustan poetry, Cairns here evolves a (provisional)
classification of ten types of etymology with an attendant
categorisation of etymological markers (which in studies of allusion
might find an analogue in 'self-reflexive annotation'),[[5]] the
utility of which Cairns then demonstrates by classifying according to
his scheme the welter of etymological material in the first two books
of the Tibullan corpus.  Here, as elsewhere, the clarity of Cairns's
argumentation and the closeness of his reading of Latin poetry bring
the very wood of the trees of the forest under the microscope in a way
that provides the reader with a systematic, if arduous, training: for
instance, anyone who perseveres with Cairns's analysis of etymological
wordplay stands to come away with the requisite philological equipment
to spot that the aforementioned emendation of oves at Tib. 2.1.58 to
opes restores an etymological gloss of Cairns's type 1 (i.e. opes
derives from oves) in positional marker <greek>b</greek>.1 (since ovili
stands in a parallel position at the end of the previous line).

In this way, Cairns's collected papers exemplify his use of traditional
philological knowhow in innovative ways. No talk here, then, of gender,
or Lacan, or focalization, or metapoetics, or intertextuality as such,
yet anyone who might criticise these papers for being theoretically
disengaged should first remember that they were in the main written
before the boulevard of literary exegesis became rutted by the comings
and goings of theoretical traffic, and that Cairns's Generic
Composition was itself the first, and arguably the most revolutionary
(and certainly one of the most controversial), of the theoretical
schools brought to bear on Latin poetry in the latter years of the
twentieth century. Moreover, later modes of analysis will find plenty
in Cairns that can be repackaged or reorganised with a little
retroactive theorising. For instance, in positing 'remote analogues' in
literary and non-literary sources for Latin elegies (as paper 22 does
for Propertius 4.9), Cairns's methodology has something in common with
intertextuality, often avant la lettre. Similarly, the thinking behind
such formulations of poetic imitatio as "there is a sliding scale from
the fleeting to the substantial and from the merely verbal to the
significantly conceptual" (71, see also 423) may look a little woolly
in the light of, for example, Stephen Hinds' work on the dynamics of
appropriation in Latin poetry (e.g. in what sense can imitation be
"merely verbal"?), but that is not to say that the many parallels
compiled in Cairns's articles are of no use to students of allusion and
intertextuality, and it can be pointed out that, with commendable
prescience, Cairns himself called in 1977 for "a framework within which
Hellenistic and Augustan self-imitation and imitation of others can be
discussed in an objective manner" (56).

Again, article 12 commits to a 'pro-Augustan' reading of Propertius via
elegy 2.7 (in which the poet adopts an ostensibly 'anti-Augustan'
stance on marital legislation) on the basis that "[a]ny reader who
considered himself a decent Roman and had a feeling of social
responsibility could only react to the elegy by concluding that
Propertius' attack on the law was without basis and was unworthy of
serious consideration" (142), and by arguing that "[w]e must [...]
recognise even in this portrayal of a degenerate's defiance of a good
law some implicit acceptance of the social norm" (145): the former
statement is at least sentient of the possibility of competing
interpretations on the basis of reader-situatedness, thus anticipating
Duncan Kennedy's application to the same elegy of the Barthesian view
of the construction of meaning at the point of reception,[[6]] while
the latter argument suggests another way in which elegy's
counter-cultural ethos has been found susceptible to deconstruction.
That said, these notions have since been formulated as precise
theoretical imperatives which, to the possible frustration of those
readers who accept them, are subordinated to the 'pro-Augustan' agenda
which Cairns continues to espouse in his readings of Propertius;
similarly, although frameworks for analyses of allusion and
intertextuality have now been evolved, they have had less discernable
impact on the terms in which Cairns's more recent work handles even
quite diffuse lexical parallels. Cairns might thus be said to have
steered his own course, giving to classical philology theories of his
own, but remaining independent of those advanced by others.

If ever a scholar could claim odi uulgus et arceo, therefore, it might
be the one encountered by the reader of this volume: with the exception
of one or two articles written with the general reader in view (e.g.
paper 9), these articles mostly presuppose familiarity with Cairns's
Generic Composition, and take no prisoners in pursuing highly
specialised, but fundamentally important, inquiries through their
innovative use of traditional philological rigour. These collected
papers record Cairns's very great service to Latin studies; although
they are unlikely to make the challenging genre of elegy any less
challenging for a debutant reader, for the same reasons no serious
student of elegy can afford not to consult this serious (and
affordable) volume.[[7]]

------------------
Notes:


1.   These are the principal objections of J. Griffin, 'Genre and Real
Life in Latin Poetry', JRS 71 (1981), 39-49, (republished as Ch. 3 of
Latin Poets and Roman Life, London, 1985), here quoted at p. 42; the
second objection, on the grounds of achronicity, is voiced also by D.A.
Russell and N.G. Wilson in the introduction to Menander Rhetor. Edited
with Translation and Commentary (Oxford, 1981), xxxi-iv.

2.   More welcoming than Griffin of generic labelling (even if not on
the basis of Menander Rhetor) is R.G.M. Nisbet, 'Pyrrha among Roses:
real life and poetic imagination in Augustan Rome', JRS 77 (1987),
184-90: 'In spite of all reservations Cairns has done much to identify
commonplaces applicable to particular situations' (186); for a
wholehearted defence of the generic approach, see I.M. Le M. DuQuesnay,
'Vergil's First Eclogue', PLLS 3 (1981), 29-182, at 53-62.

3.   See also chapter 9 ('The Origins of Latin love-elegy') in F.
Cairns, Tibullus. A Hellenistic Poet at Rome (Cambridge, 1978),
reprinted with a postscript in H.-C. Guenther (ed.), A Companion to
Propertius (Brill: Leiden 2006), 69-95.

4.   Against the view Callimachean influence in the Monobiblos (with
specific reference to paper 11), see J. Butrica, 'The Amores of
Propertius: Unity and Structure in Books 2-4', ICS 21 (1996), 87-158,
at 104-7.

5.   For this technique, see S. Hinds, Allusion and Intertext: dynamics
of appropriation in Roman poetry (Cambridge, 1998), 1-16.

6.   D.F. Kennedy, The Arts of Love: Five Studies in the Discourse of
Roman Love Elegy (Cambridge, 1993), 35-7.

7.   Following the prescription for the genre of the review, I note
(only) the following typographical errors: p. 100 (line 12): the
reference is to 2.34.91-92 (not 2.32.91-92); p. 164 (first line):
'Propertius' (not 'Propcrtius'); p. 168 (last line): 'patterns' (not
'pattems'); p. 207 (line 14): opening inverted comma is missing; p. 383
(second last line): 'celebrate' (not 'celebrating'); p. 427 (line 9):
'two' (not 'tvo'); p. 428 (sixth last line): 'too old' (not 'to old').