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In Defence of Persius

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

J. P. Sullivan
J. P. Sullivan*
Affiliation:
State University of New York at Buffalo
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Extract

In the darkness of these times, it may well prove that we are the last generation to pursue the study of classics at all seriously, whether we are hewing squarely to the philological, or more modern, approaches to classical literature. The rights and wrongs of this particular ideological struggle will be settled, I suspect, by time and our students. One may, however, take for granted the perceptible erosion of anything like a real inwardness with Latin as a language among the protevangelists of either school. The gentlemanly dilettante stuck to his familiar authors, such as Virgil and Horace, ignoring their Alexandrian complexities for their human values; the supposedly serious scholar adopted such a scientific attitude to Latin that it would sometimes seem that his main pleasure consisted in correcting Lewis and Short, while putting together prose and verse compositions for his peers or pupils.

Certainly ignorance on the one hand and pedantry on the other are logical culprits, along with time, for this loss of inwardness with Latin as a language. One would like to think that Dr. Johnson (and some of his contemporaries) had something close to the careless familiarity with Latin displayed by Dante or Poggio: unfortunately a glance at the frigid exercises to Ms Thrale or to his Highland hosts, written during his tour of the Hebrides, quickly dispels this illusion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , 1972 , pp. 48 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 1972

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References

1. Specific critics, such as Dessen, Nisbet, and Reckford, are discussed below.

2. Introduction to The Satires of Persius, Translated by Merwin, W. S. (Bloomington, 1961), p. 45.Google Scholar

3. “Studies in Persius”, Hermes 90 (1962) 483.Google Scholar

4. “Persius”, in Critical Essays on Roman Literature: Satire. Ed. Sullivan, J. P. (London, 1963), pp. 39–71.Google Scholar

5. Junctura Callidus Acri: A Study of Persius’ Satires (1968Google Scholar).

6. Still the best the best article to consull, although it is an attack on the over-free use of the concept, is Ehrenpreis, I., “Personae”, in Camden, C. (Ed.), Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature (Chicago, 1963), pp. 25ff.Google Scholar

7. D. A. West in his recent book, The Imagery of Lucretius, sets out to do the same for Lucretius with considerable success. He is aided, as Dessen is not, by the large range of translations of Lucretius that he can draw on for his sottisier of misapprehensions and misrenderings.

8. See Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius: A study in Creative Translation (1964), pp. 64–76.Google Scholar

9. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (London, 1954), pp. 25,33Google Scholar.

10. He follows Virgil in his preference for four specific patterns of dactyls and spondees in the first four feet viz, dsss, ddss, dsds, sdss, but not in his desire for variety cf. Duckworth, G. E., “Five Centuries of Latin Hexameter Poetry”, TAPA 98. (1967) 109–116Google Scholar.

11. E.g. Persius Sat. 6 and Sat. 1 have 7.11 and 7.05 words respectively in the average line; Lucilius has 7.11, whereas Ovid and Virgil have 6.43 and 6.11 respectively. (I am grateful to my student, Mr. Robert Wolff, for providing me with a great deal of statistical analysis on such points as these.)