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أكـاديـمـي مـشـارك
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رد: تجمع النقد الادبي .... !!
In the Satires, he refers to “the college of flute-players, quacks, beggars, mimic actresses, parasites, and all their kinds.”
- Horace’s hatred of the popular culture of his day is apparent in his “Letter to Augustus” where he writes
- Horace, “A Letter to Augustus,” in Classical Literary Criticism
This passage how Horace saw the contact between the Greek heritage and his Roman world:
- It was a relationship of force and conquest that brought the Romans to Greece. As soon as Greece was captive, however, it held its conqueror captive, charming him with her nicely preserved culture (books).
- Horace shows prejudice to the culture of everyday people, but he does not know that the culture of Greece that he sees in books now was itself a popular culture.
- Horace equates the preserved Greek culture (books) with “elegance” and he equates the popular culture of his own time with “venom.”
- Horace’s hatred of the popular culture of his day was widespread among Latin authors.
- Poetry for Horace and his contemporaries meant written monuments that would land the lucky poet’s name on a library shelf next to the great Greek names. It would grant the poet fame, a nationalistic sense of glory and a presence in the pedagogical curriculum.
- Horace’s poetic practice was not rooted in everyday life, as Greek poetry was. He read and reread the Iliad in search of, as he put it, what was bad, what was good, what was useful, and what was not.
- In the scorn he felt towards the popular culture of his day, the symptoms were already clear of the rift between “official” and “popular” culture that would divide future European societies.
- The “duly assigned functions and tones” of poetry that Horace spent his life trying to make poets adhere to, were a mould for an artificial poetry with intolerant overtone.
- Horace’s ideas on poetry are based on an artificial distinction between a “civilized” text-based culture and a “vulgar” oral one.
Imitating the Greeks
- In all his writing, Horace urges Roman writers to imitate the Greeks and follow in their footsteps. “Study Greek models night and day,” was his legendary advice in the Ars Poetica (270).
- This idea, though, has an underlying contradiction. Horace wants Roman authors to imitate the Greeks night and day and follow in their footsteps, but he does not want them to be mere imitators.
- In the process of following and imitating the Greeks, Horace differentiates himself from those who “mimic” the ancients and slavishly attempt to reproduce them. Obviously, he does not have much esteem for this kind of imitation and saw his own practice to be different
- In imitating the Greeks, Horace claims originality, but the bold claim he makes of walking on virgin soil strongly contradicts the implied detail that the soil was not virgin, since Greek predecessors had already walked it.
- In addition, as Thomas Greene notes, the precise nature of what Horace claims to have brought back from his “walk” is not clear.
Horace and Stylistic Imitation
- Horace also advises the aspirant poet to make his tale believable
- This use of imitation denotes a simple reality effect idea. Horace simply asks the writer to make the tale believable, according to fairly common standards. His use of the term and the idea of imitation are casual and conventional. If you depict a coward, Horace advises, make the depiction close to a real person who is a coward.
- But Horace only had a stylistic feature in mind. As Craig La Drière notes, Horace could not even think of poetry, all poetry, as an imitation, the way the idea is expressed in Book X of the Republic, or in Aristotle’s Poetics.
- Horace’s ideas about imitating the Greeks and about poetry imitating real life models were both imprecise, but they will become VERY influential in shaping European art and literature
- the principles of taste and “sensibility” (decorum) he elaborates to distinguish what he thought was “civilized” from “uncivilized” poetry will be instrumental in shaping the European distinction between official high culture and popular low one.
- Poetry in Horace’s text was subordinated to oratory and the perfection of self-expression. Homer and Sophocles are reduced to classroom examples of correct speaking for rhetoricians to practice with.
- The idea of following the Greeks, as Thomas Greene notes, only magnified the temporal and cultural distance with them.
Quintilian advocates two contradictory positions
- First that progress could be achieved only by those who refuse to follow, hence the undesirability of imitating the Greeks.
- At the same time, Quintilian continues to advocate imitation, and goes on to elaborate a list of precepts to guide writers to produce “accurate” imitations
- Seneca
- Seneca singles out the process of transformation that takes place when bees produce honey or when food, after it is eaten, turns into blood and tissue. He, then, explores the process of mellification and its chemistry
- Latin authors never discuss poetry or literature as an imitation (mimesis); they only discuss them as an imitation of the Greeks.
- Latin authors are not familiar with Plato’s and Aristotle’s analysis of poetry. The Poetics or Republic III and X do not seem to have been available to the Romans:
- “Unfortunately, Aristotle’s Poetics exerted no observable influence in the classical period. It appears likely that the treatise was unavailable to subsequent critics.”
- Latin authors used poetry and literature for two things only :
- - To improve eloquence
- - To sing the national glories of Rome and show off its culture.
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