Parallel session 3, panel 2: Literary Memory

(Thursday 21^st June, 2.15-4.15pm)

Malleable memory in Augustan Rome - Ovid's Venus
Aimee Hinds (University of Leicester)

This paper is concerned with the way in which the use of the distant past in Augustan Rome is subverted by Ovid’s use of Venus is Book 10 of the Metamorphoses. Specifically, I will argue that Ovid is conforming to the exploitation of the distant past in order to create new contemporary narratives, as utilised in the justification and consolidation of Augustus’ rule (Zanker 1988), but in doing so cleverly undermines it to appropriate the symbol of Venus as the mother of Rome to legitimise his own place in the poetic canon.

My claim is that Ovid’s construction of Book 10 of the Metamorphoses, which uses Orpheus as its narrator, explicitly places Venus at its centre. Orpheus’ tale becomes a frame narrative for Venus’ tale of the death of Adonis, thereby highlighting her significance in the Roman pantheon. This episode both emphasises both the ancientness of Venus, by placing her alongside the archetypal bard in the form of Orpheus, and creates ambiguity around Augustus’ claim to her as Trojan ancestor by her association with Orpheus as a Thracian. The position of Book 10 at the crux between the age of the hero and that of history (Rosati 2002) provides a counterpoint to the presentation of Venus in the Aeneid; it trivialises her part in the life of Aeneas and allows for her benefaction to be usurped by Ovid. Venus is used liberally elsewhere by Ovid, as his patron in helping others to practice the art of love; the Venus of the Metamorphoses reconciles the earlier amorous Venus with the mother of the Roman people.

In using the accepted structure to invent communal memory of the distant past, Ovid manages to create his own individualised narrative in the present, in which he himself is the natural successor to the greatest of all poets and furthermore, is legitimised by Venus herself. Ultimately I aim to illustrate the use of both the maintenance and subversion of Augustan ideology by Ovid, and the larger significance of the currency of memory and memory-making in Augustan Rome.

Quoting from Memory? Shared Knowledge in Cicero’s Book Fragments of the Republican Thyestes Tragedies
Maria Haley (University of Leeds)

Republican tragedies have been treated as forgotten theatre, resigned to the footnotes of studies on either Seneca or the Attic tragedians. In order to recover these lost plays, we rely largely on quotations in either Nonius’ grammar or Cicero’s prose. Whereas Nonius focuses on linguistic anomalies, Cicero’s texts provide the most useful reflection of the content of tragedies by quoting full lines.

Taking Cicero’s quotation of Accius’ Atreus and Ennius’ Thyestes as a case study, we will first examine when Cicero recalls the tragedies and how this illuminates his own work. This will allow us to compare the different interpretations of quotations that recur across Cicero’s philosophical and rhetorical treatises, to uncover how our impression of the tragedies is filtered by Cicero’s recollection of the tragic text or a particular performance of it. Accius’ Atreus tells the tale of Atreus feeding his brother Thyestes’ children to him. Ennius’ Thyestes deals with Thyestes’ rape of his daughter to father an avenging son. Both are quoted in historiography, even in Seneca’s own prose, to critique contemporary tyrants by analogy. As a result, the Thyestes tragedies provide a useful case study for comparing Cicero’s recollection of the tragedies against others’.

Thus we will then consider whether Cicero quotes with these texts at hand, or from memory by comparing recurring quotations of the same lines for inconsistencies, which may indicate that Cicero recalls a performance of the lines specifically. Finally, we will examine what extent Cicero relies on the memory of his reader, prompting them with his recurring dictum “Nosti quae sequuntur” (we know what follows).¹ In doing so we can gage the contemporary appeal of Accius’ Atreus and Ennius’ Thyestes respectively, based on Cicero’s reliance on shared knowledge with his readership.

Ultimately by comparing Cicero’s works and spotting trends in his quotation, this study will reveal how the book fragments of Republican tragedy once lived beyond the book, in the memory of: initial audience members, Cicero himself and his own readership.

¹ E.g. Cic. Tusc. Disp. 4.36

Select Bibliography:

Abbott, F.F. 1907. The Theatre as a Factor in Roman Politics under the Republic. TAPA. 38. pp. 49-56.
Goldberg, S. 2005. Constructing Literature in the Roman Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gill, C. 2005. The Family Sagas of the Houses of Aeacus and Pelops: From Ennius to Accius. Dioniso. 4. 56-71.
Michel, A. 1983. Cicéron et la tragédie: les citations de poètes dans les livres II-IV des “Tusculanes”. Helmantica. 34. 443-54.
Schierl. P. 2015. Roman Tragedy- Ciceronian Tragedy? Cicero’s Influence on Our perception of Republican Tragedy. In: Brill’s Companion to Roman Tragedy. 45-63.
von Albrecht, A. 2003. Cicero’s Style: A Synopsis. Leiden: Brill.
Wright, F. W. 1931. Cicero and the Theatre. Northampton: Smith College.

Escaping Aeneas: Virgil, the Epic Tradition, and Aeneas’ Memory of the Trojan War
Davide Scarpignato (University of Exeter)

This paper argues that Virgil used the epic tradition of the Aeneas legend to construct his own Aeneas as an ambiguous character haunted by his memory of the Trojan war. I propose that, while Virgil preferred the story of pius Aeneas to other versions of the legend, he still wanted to include the latter in his epic. This fact is evident from Aeneas’ speeches in Aeneid 1 and 2, in which Virgil refers to the Iliad and the Epic Cycle in drawing on certain features of their characterisation of Aeneas. In order to demonstrate this thesis, I will first summarise the research done so far on the characterisation of Aeneas in the epic tradition, to situate my paper within the scholarly landscape. Secondly, I will consider the evidence for Virgil as a reader of the tradition of the Aeneas legend, suggesting that in constructing his Aeneas he wished to link himself to Homer and the Epic Cycle. Then, I will discuss the characterisation of Aeneas within the Iliad and the Cyclic epics. In the former, Aeneas shows features which are re-used by Virgil, such as his pietas and the fact that he is destined to rule over the Trojans. Yet Aeneas is also described as in pain due to his hostility to Priam, resulting from a feud between their two houses. As can be seen by comparing the Iliad with the Epic Cycle, this feud is also connected with Aeneas’ suffering, which was brought upon him by Priam’s house with the Trojan war, but also with his destiny, since it is necessary that Priam’s house be destroyed before Aeneas can rule. It is because of this troubled relationship with Priam that Aeneas singles the Trojan king out among all figures whilst gazing at the images on the temple of Juno. Aeneas’ subtleness of phrasing in referring to Priam reveals his difficulty in forgoing his hatred towards him and confronting his own past, thus showing how Virgil used the epic tradition to enrich the characterisation of his Aeneas.

Euripides’ selective amnesia in mythical examples
Sabrina Mancuso (University of Tübingen)

Even in ancient times, the collective memory of Greek myths was used, in order to seek mythical examples, which could be suitable to the discussed situation. The mythical example is introduced in Homer to encourage or to comfort. In order to produce similar examples, Homer is ready even to invent details of a myth, as Niobe’s myth in Achilles’ speech (Il. XXIV 599-620), aimed just to persuade Priam to take part in the banquet, exemplifies. If we turn to the dramatic uses of mythical paradigms, Ino’s example in Euripides’ Medea (1282-1289) and Procne’s example in Euripides’ Heracles (1016-1020) reload around the filicide committed by them. Taking into account the couples Medea-Ino and Heracles-Procne, it can be observed that in each couple there is one character acting in the madness, while the other one acts in full awareness. So, Euripides compares his heroes with characters that, although similar, are not strictly identical to them. The aim of this paper is to highlight via Ino’s and Procne’s specimina how Euripides, in the selection of examples from the collective memory of myths, appears to be suffering from a sort of “selective amnesia”. In particular, I’ll show that only exchanging the first illustrans with the second one in the examples of the two tragedies, a complete relevance with the corresponding illustrandum can be obtained. Euripides separates as much as possible the mythical example from the dramatic reality, although presenting it emphatically as the most similar case offered by the whole tradition. In this way, he tries to isolate his characters in their pathetic greatness and to present them as unjustifiable (in the case of Medea) or inconsolable (in the case of Heracles), how this paper aims to show. Surely, Euripides could have chosen more suitable characters as examples for Medea’s and Heracles’ sufferings. An intentionality in his choice of antiphrastic examples is, in any case, evident, especially in the comparison with the Homeric use of mythical examples, which is totally opposed in relation to Euripides’ use of them.