Flavian Epicists on Virgil's Epic Technique

Abstract

Despite some notable recent essays in the rehabilitation of the Latin epic of the first century A.D., there remains a prejudice that post-Virgilian epicists are slavishly imitative in a way that Virgil (and his contemporaries in other genres) are not. The following three studies, in Valerius Flaccus, Statius, and Silius Italicus, are contributions to an argument, currently being conducted on a wide front, that imitation, even of a very close kind, may behave in a dynamic and creative way; in particular I wish to show how the epigone may function as an implicit literary analyst or critic, anticipating the results of twentieth-century criticism. My three examples take their starting-point from what I see as a general modern consensus about the nature of Virgilian epic, but the direction could be reversed, that is, we might use post-Virgilian epic as a critical aid toourreading of Virgil. I take individual passages from the Flavian epics in whichtwo(or more) passages of theAeneidare laid under contribution; analysis of such passages reveals that the later poets were reading Virgil with an eye to structural correspondences or contrasts, and to image-structures reaching from the small scale of the ‘multiple-correspondence simile’ to the large scale of patterns that arch over the whole text, features that have been at the centre of much modern Virgilian criticism. Repeated reading of theAeneidreinforces the impression of a vast structure of self-allusion and self-comment aiming for a maximal transparency of the text to itself, in so far as theprima materiaof language will allow, and demanding a ‘simultaneous reading’ that is more spatial than temporal. The fragmentary state of previous large-scale Hellenistic poetry makes it difficult to judge of the originality of Virgil in this extreme extension of the features of repetition and self-allusion that characterize all literary works; but, for example, every increase in our knowledge of Callimachus'Aitiamakes it seem more likely that it was constructed in a similar way.

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