Clay, D. (1998) the Theory of the Literary Persona in Antiquity_MD 40, Pp. 9-40

Diskin Clay

The Theory of the Literary Persona in Antiquity

«Moi, et, quand je dis 'moi', c'est ne qu'une façon de parler». Pierre-François Lacenaire, in Jacques Pré- vert, Les Enfants du Paradis

1. First Persons and Personae

This essay is an inquest into two missing persons and a search for an ancient theory or, if not theory, an ancient awareness of the literary persona, both of the poet and his addressee. As criticism of ancient poetry has shifted our attention from the poet and the poem itself to an original audience or an imag- ined reader (and to the critic himself), the concept of the literary persona has become familiär - perhaps tediously familiär. And, as the Romantic concept of the poet's personality has withdrawn from the stage of the criticism of Greek and Ro- man poetry, its vivid and varied characters hâve become masked, and what readers once saw as thè immediate expression of a poet's individuality has corne to be regarded as the expression of his rhetorical intentions. Paradoxically, the ancient critics of «Classical» poetry must now seem almost Ro- mantic in their assumption that a poet can be read directly through his, or more rarely her, poetry1. This attitude is

1. Thus, poetry supplied the ancient biographer with much of his raw material, as Janet Fairweather has shown in her treatment of the fictions of ancient

biography, Fiction in the Biographies of Ancient Wnters, «Ancient Society» 5, 1974, pp. 234-255 and as Mary Lefkowitz has demonstrated more systematically in her treatment of The Lives of the Greek Poets, Baltimore 1981 (Lives). An im-

portant contribution to the history of biography and the lives of thè poets in An-

tiquity is Graziano Arrighetti's Cameleonte, La mimesis e h critica letteraria, in Poeti, eruditi e biografi: Momenti della nflessione dei greci sulla letteratura, Pisa 1987, pp. 141-159. In this essay, I am not primarily concerned with the actual rhetorical practice or communicative stratégies of the ancient poets who speak in

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10 Diskin Clay

clearly exhibited in Aristotle's Poetics, where he makes it clear that he regarded comic poetry as thè work of frivolous men and tragic poetry as thè work of serious men, even though their genre was strictly «mimetic» and these early poets did not speak in their own persons (4.1448b24-27). It is obvious from even the most cursory study of the comments on ancient

poets that most ancient readers regarded poetry as autobiographical and - to use the word Goethe made famous - confessional.

This kind of reading was especially congenial for the lyric poets and the elegists who spoke of themselves or for themselves in the first person, but it holds for the poets of hexameter poetry when they speak in the first person, as is thè case of Hesiod of the Theogony and Works and Days2y of Empedo- cles, Lucretius, and Virgil of the Georgics, as well as Horace of the Satires, and Persius and Juvenal. I commemorate this view of poetry as autobiographical and the unmediated expression of a poet's personality and life because it is so long- lived, tenacious, and so «anthropological» - in the Greek sense of this term. In treating the , Aristotle states that he is not , a gossip (Nicomachean Ethics 5.1125a5). Most ancient readers were interested in the man or woman behind the poem and became themselves the

poets of biographical fictions. A brief survey of this manner of reading ancient poetry will suggest, in some measure, the

the first person singular (or plural). An instructive survey of the broad and varied terrain of the autobiographical «I» in ancient poetry is La componente auto-

biografica nella poesia Greca e Latina: Atti del Convegno, Pisa, 16-17 maggio, 1991, ed. Graziano Arrighetti and Franco Montanari, Pisa 1993 (La compenente autobiografica). Arrighetti provides a judicious conspectus of the work of the conférence in terms of the controversy over the status of first person Statements in lyric poetry (pp. 11-24). I also refer to Mega nepios: il destinano nelVepos di- dascalico, ed. A. Schiessaro, P. Mitsis, and J. S. Clay («MD» 31), Pisa 1993 (Mega Nepios). 2. Whose fictive persona is well treated by Mark Griffith, Personality in He- siod, Classical Antiquity 2, 1983, pp. 37-83, and whose addressee, Perses of the Works and Days, is unmasked to reveal a rhetorical persona by Jenny Strauss

Clay in The Education of Perses (Mega Nepiosy pp. 23-33). In his study of He- siod, Textualization of Personal Temporality (La componente autobiografica, pp. 73-91), Glenn Most properly calls attention to the manner in which Hesiod insists on his development as a poet from Theogony to Works and Days. M. L. West

lays out the external évidence for regarding Hesiod's Perses as a rhetorical persona in his commentary to the Works and Days, Oxford, 1978, pp. 33-40.



The Theory of thè Literary Persona in Antiquity 1 1

great obstacles that stood in the way of any ancient theory of the literary persona. The practice of ancient poets is another thème, but thè biographical fashion of literary criticism, which has persisted well into this Century, has obscured the rhetorical practice of ancient poets.

We begin with Homer, whose «personality» is not revealed in the first person singular and who stands in striking contrast to Hesiod, who names himself, and to the lyric poets, whose lyric «I» has arrested the attention of their later readers. Homer was already regarded as blind by the author of the Delian Hymn to Apollo (172), because he described the Phaea- cian singer Demodokos as blind (Odyssey 8.62-66). (Just so, Hesiod was regarded as the son of Dios because he addressed his brother Perses as , Works and Days 229). After Homer appears the first Greek lyric poet, Archilochos, with whom Homer is frequently paired by the ancient literary critics. Some of Archilochos' poetry is «dramatic», but he speaks most often in the first person singular or addresses others, such as Glaukos and Perikles, and in so doing créâtes a lyric «I». Critias notoriously derived his bad opinion of Archilo- chos directly and exclusively from his poetry: «We would never hâve known that he was an adultérer except from his poetry»3. This view of Archilochos has been very tenacious. Bruno Snell greeted him as thè poet who initiated thè era of the lyric and introduced «upon the stage of European history a number of highly individualized actors, with a great variety of rôles»4. A confessional reading of the Cologne epode of Archilochos led one of its first editors, Reinhold Merkelbach,

3. Diels, Vorsokr. 88B44 = testimonium 46 in G. Tarditi, Archiloco, Rome, 1968.

4. The Discovery of thè Mind, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer, Cambridge, Mass. 1953), p. 44. Where Snell's stress was on «individualized», the words «actors» and «rôles» hâve increasingly received the stress. The studies of M. L. West in Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus, Berlin, 1974, pp. 26-27 and Gregory Nagy on iambos, The Best of the Achaeans, Baltimore, 1979, pp. 243-252, transform Archilochos and Lykambes from vivid individuai personalities into stock characters in the repertory of public and performed poetry. Simon Slings has reminded us of the alternative view of first person Statements in Archlochos represented by Hermann Fraenkel in his Dichtung und Philosophie des frühen Griechentums (1951), who speaks of the poet's «représentative I» («das urteilende Ich»), The I in Personal Archaic Lyric: An Introduction The Poet's I in Archaic Lyric, Am- sterdam 1990, pp. 1-29.



12 Diskin Clay

to thè severe judgment that Archilochos was «ein schwerer Psychopath»5. Alcaeus, who might have known her, described Sappho as , chaste6. Wilamowitz, who believed he knew her, read her poetry as if it came from Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit and constituted «fragments from a great confession»7. The first person Statements to be found in the lyric poetry of Pindar are responsible for a tissue of biographical hypothèses about Pindar's career that have entan- gled critics both ancient and modern in their web8.

Even the tragic and comic poets of Athens, who never speak in their own voice (even in the parabasis of Aristo- phanic comédies), were seen as revealing themselves in what their characters say. In Aristophanes' Frogs, Aeschylus is shown in a deep rage and boasts that he has written a play «filled with Ares» (his Seven against Thebes). The rage, of course, is taken from the play. Euripides is scolded by

5. Merkelbach and M. L. West, Ein Archilochos-Papyrus, «Zeits. Pap. Ep.» 14, 1974, 113. We should note that the Cologne Archilochos epode yields a name for Neoboule's mother, Amphimedo (line 7). Daughter takes after her mother in that she cannot make up her mind; both have speaking names, as does father Lykambes. 6. E. Lobel and D. Page, Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (Oxford, 1955) 384.

7. «Bruchstücke einer grossen Konfession», Dichtung und Wahrheit, from Goethes Werke in zwei Bände , vol. 1, Munich, 1957 pp. 1040. Wilamowitz gal- lantly protected Sappho from the authorship of (PMG frag- mentum adespotum 976 Page), because he could not conceive of his Sappho as waiting through the clear night for a lover who never appears: «das soll Sappho sein?», Isyllos von Epidaurus, Philologische Untersuchungen 9, Berlin, 1886, p. 129, n. 7.

8. As Elroy Bundy argued in his Studia Pindarica of 1962 (reprinted by the University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1986). Mary Lefkowitz has continued thè line of argument and distinguished between the «I» of the poet and the «I» of his chorus first and almost simultaneously in The First Person in Pindar, «Harv. St. Class. Phil.» 67, 1963, pp. 177-253, then in her treatment of Pindar in Lives, 57-66; she has taken her argument for Pindar further in the arti- cles collected in First-Person Fictions: Pindar's Poetic T, Oxford, 1991. G. B. D'Alessio has responded by arguing that thè persona loquens in Pindar and earlier choral poetry has an important public and social dimension: «the construc- tion of a poet's literary persona in this period cannot be divorced from the con- struction of his social persona», First-Person Problems in Pindar, «Bull. Inst. Class. Stud.» 40, 1994, pp. 117-139 (p. 138). This does not, of course, speak to how later reader's attempted to see the poet through the poet's self-presenta- tion.



The Theory of the Liter ary Persona in Antiquity 13

Aeschylus for his obsession with Aphrodite. Aristophanes, who is the voice behind the masks making thèse charges, is assumed by the guests at Agathon's victory banquet to be a clown and devoted to Dionysos and Aphrodite, simply because he is a comic poet9.

As for the Roman poets and the elegists especially, we know thè fate of those who spoke in their own person of something as personal as love. Even the didactic poet Lu- cretius, who speaks in vehement terms about the madness of love, is said to hâve taken a love potion, which drove him to insanity and suicide10. Catullus was read from his poetry, and poems 5 and 7 specifically, as being a sensualist and no red- blooded Roman male. Some time ago Léon Hermann surveyed the Odes and Epodes of Horace for the history of his love life and illustrated his results by an impressive «table an- alytique» listing some 37 affairs - both hetero- and homosex- ual11. Propertius makes it clear that his erotic élégies had made him a legend {fabula) in Rome (II 24al-2)12. Ovid's fate we know, and we can judge from it the abilities of Augustus as a literary critic and censor.

The biographical mode of literary criticism is especially congenial and welcome to the Classical philologist. Outside

9. Ran. 1060-1022 (Aeschylus), 1045-1047 (Euripides). A like charge cornes from Satyros' Life of Euripides. Satyros, who needed to explain Euripides' miso-

gyny (as read in his plays), hit upon the theory that he was so hostile to women because he was so attracted to them, Vita di Euripide ·, Pisa 1964, p. 126 Arri-

ghetti. For the subject of Euripides, see especially Lefkowitz, Lives, pp. 88-104. In Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes is described as hung-over, a clown, and devoted to the gods of love and intoxication, Sym. 176B, 177E, 189A-B, 213C

10. According to St. Jerome ab Abr. for the year 96, p. 149 Helm. Lucretius' furor is surely read from his treatment of the furor of love, Lucr. 4,1069 and 1117.

11. «La vie amoureuse d'Horace», «Latomus» 14, 1955, pp. 4-30.

12. Tu loquerisy cum sis iam noto fabula libro I et tua sit toto Cynthia lectaforof Propertius' fate at the hands of one editor is a curious case of the biographical reading of poetry. O. L. Richmond assumed that Propertius' poetry must be the direct reflection of his life, but found that reflection distorted in thè mss. of his confessional poet: «Much that would follow from a new text is clear to the least

Professional eye. ... He would be found ... to hâve expressed his moods as other lovers, to have ordered his diary of love by its calendar, the tale of its phases by their rotation or succession in the expérience of life», Sexti Propertii quae super- sunt opera, Cambridge 1928, p. 63.



14 Diskin Clay

an ancient poet's poetry we hâve very little to guide us in en-

visaging an individuai poet's life. Even philosophers, who

spoke in the first person, were not exempt from this mode of

reading. Heraclitus died buried in a düng heap because he said that a corpse should be dumped out more quickly than a chamber pot13. Empedocles leaped into Aetna as he is «made to die by his own words»14. Such readings are inspired by a vi- sion of philology as biography and what might be called the cult of personality. Its enterprise is most forcefully articulated

by its greatest modern practitioner, Ulrich von Wilamowitz Moellendorff, writing in the age of Stephan Georg and Friedrich Gundolf:

The biographer proceeds from work to work, from interprétation to interprétation, always seeking the author behind the book. If a hu- man being stands out whom we can recognize as such, if thè individuai features unite themselves into a single portrait which as a unit is crédible, the task of the philologist is accomplished15.

This is from the Introduction to Wilamowitz' Piato, a writer who never (except in his letters) spoke in his own person. I

give Wilamowitz' summation of the attitude we hâve briefly surveyed in the translation of Harold Cherniss, who was, in 1943, one of the first Classicists to challenge the biographical fashion of literary criticism. Eric Havelock had preceded him in 1938 in his The Lyric Genius of Catullus16. But in their vig- orous protests neither Cherniss nor Havelock were con-

13. As was made clear by Hermann Fraenkel, Thought atterri in Heraditus, «Am. Journ. Phil.» 59, 1938, pp. 309-314.

14. The words of Diels, Vorsokr. 31B115. A biographical reading whose source is nicely illustrated by Ava Chitwood, The Death of Empedocles, «Am. Journ. Phil.» 107, 1986, pp. 175-191. The biographical lens transforme Pausanias, the addressee of Empedocles' On Natura, into his young lover (D.L. 8,60). Dirk Ob- bink has provided the first careful study of Empedocles* multiple addressees in

Mega Nepios, pp. 51-92.

15. Piato: Sein Leben und Seine Werke,3 Berlin, 1929, p. 8, trans. Harold Cher- niss, Me ex versiculis meis parum pudicum, University of California Publications in Classical Philology 12, 1943, pp. 279-292 (reprinted by J. P. Sullivan, Criticai

Essays on Roman Literature, Cambridge, Mass. 1962, pp. 15-30). Wilamowitz first published his Platon in 1918.

16. The Canons of Catuüan Criticism, in The Lyric Genius of Catullus, Oxford, 1938, pp. 73-86.



The Theory of thè Literary Persona in Antiquity 15

cerned with replacing the personality and biography they had attempted to remove from Catullan criticism with a Catullus who is a rhetorical persona and as much his own création as Vivamus mea Lesbia atque amemus. The seemingly modem notion of the literary persona was invoked (if not introduced in modem criticism of Classical Literature) by William S. An- derson in his analysis of Juvenal's persona in Anger in Juve- nal and Seneca17. Thè criticai enterprise of unmasking an author, as as he présents himself within a work of prose fiction, to reveal a mask or a cabinet of masks seems commonplace since Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction. This book can- onized the conception of the author of prose fiction as a persona or a character projected into his work - not for the purposes of confession or self-revelation or self-exploration - but for the task of persuasion18. The new awareness of the rhetorical persona has extended to our understanding of the poetry of Archilochos, Hesiod, Pindar, Lucretius, Catullus, and Propertius, ail of whom hâve been read since antiquity as highly personal poets19. This récent shift in criticai interest from author to persona has led to practical criticism of indi-

17. University of California Publications in Chssical Philology 19, no. 3, 1964 (reprinted in Essays on Roman Satire, Princeton, 1982, 293-361). The approach was inspired by A. Kernan's The Cankered Muse, New Haven, 1959. Maynard Mack's treatment of Pope's Epistle to Dr. Aburthnot in Masks and Fates in Sa- tire, «Yale Review», 1950, pp. 80-92. and the menace of its application to Roman satire moved Gilbert Highet to protest this new mode of criticism in Masks and Faces in Satire, «Hermes» 102, 1974, pp. 321-327. His distinctions of genre are worth taking seriously, but few critics will now agrée with him that: «In the ostensibly autobiographical satires of Horace thè persona theory will not work» (p. 337). Niall Rudd in his fine essay Sincerity and mask, Lines of E&quiry: S$u-: dies of Latin Poetry, Cambridge 1976, pp. 145-181 (pp. 176-181 especially) objects to the application of the theory of the literary persona to Horace's satires, but J. E. G. Zetzel's essay Horace's Liber Sermonum: The Structure of Ambi- guity, «Arethusa» 13, 1980, pp. 70-73 is a convincing attempt to make it work.

18. Chicago 1961. Parts II-III are devoted to the rhetoric of narration and their

arguments are conveniently summarized in pp. 149-169. I cite the second édition of 1983.

19. This shift from an interest in personality to the study of rhetorical personae is especially evident in the essays of Mega Nepios. I make the argument that Lu- cretius' Memmius is a rhetorical persona (rather than the Memmius of Münzer RE article) in Lucretius and Epicurus, Ithaca and London 1983, pp. 212-225. Gian Biagio Conte has treated Lucretius addressee in more sublime terms In- structions for a Sublime Reader: Form of the Text and Form of the Addressee in



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vidual authors. Little has been done to document and assess the ancient theoretical awareness of what now seems a famil- iär distinction between a poet and reader outside a poem and poet and reader, or audience, within a poem.

Among the Greek critics, the séparation of a poet from his persona came late and with great difficulty. Yet, we should re- cali the practice of poetry and Aristophanes' présentation of Agathon in the Thesmophoriazusae in one of the disguises that were acknowledged to be an integral part of the poet's craft20. The most sustained protest against identifying a poet with what his characters say came from Alexandria in the second Century B. C. and a critic whose universe centered on the books that were his responsibility as a librarian. Our évidence is clear in showing that Aristarchos of Samothrace opposed thè condemnation of some speeches in Homer by pointing out that they were spoken «in [an assumed] character» ( ). In response to his predecessors, who censured Homer for what his characters say, Aristarchos developed a criticai principle disassociating Homer from his characters: «It is the character who speaks» ( ). In the case of Homer, this edict reads: «if something is said in the Homeric poems, is is not Homer who says it» ( ' 5 )21. (The same could be said for Piato, who is too often taken at Socrates' word.) In a fascinat- ing column from his treatise On Poems V, Philodemus speaks

Lucretius's De rerum natura, in Genres and Readers, trans. Glenn W. Most, Bal- timore 1994, pp. 1-34. He never once refers to «Memmius» in this essay. 20. This is stated as a principle by the poet dressed as a iemale character: «A

poet must adapt his character to thè dramas he intends to create», Thesm. 149- 150. On this large thème, we hâve the penetrating interprétation of Froma Zei- tlin, «Travesties of Gender and Genre in Aristophanes* Thesmophoriazusae», in

Reflections of Women in Antiquity, ed. Helene P. Foley, New York 1981, pp. 169-217.

21. This last formulation cornes from Ath. 5,178D (on //. 1,225, a line which Zenodotos had athetized). There is a brief exposition of the principle in G. M. A. Grube, The Greek and Roman Critics, Toronto 1965 (reprinted 1995), pp. DO- DI. Earlier studies of the principle are to be found in A. Roemer, Die Homere- xegese in ihren Grundzügen, ed. E. Beizner, Paderborn 1924, pp. 223-224 and 253-256 and the dissertation of his Student, Hans Dachs, Die - , Erlangen, 1913, pp. 8-26 especially. . J. Richardson has conveniently set out the évidence for an interest in ethos visible in the Homeric scholia, Literary Criticism in the Exegetical Scholia to the Iliad: A Sketch, «Class. Quart.» 30, 1980, pp. 272-275.




of characters as being a part of the «material» of the poet and he seems to suggest that the poet himself is a character as well as the characters he deploys in his poem22.

The theory of the literary persona seems to hâve dawned as a new day in modem criticai discourse. As it arose at the beginning of this Century in the criticism of English literature23, it illuminated only thè persona of the author as created by the author in and for his poem. Ezra Pound's Personae (1909) was a produci of this awareness and helped make it more acute, but prose fiction was the primary focus of criticism. The persona of the reader - or addressee, or narratee, or mock reader - emerged only later, but his mask now faces the mask of the poet on the stage of reader response criticism24.

This mask has become familiär only recently in the criticism of Classical literature. The hard won distinction that has now emerged is that there is a différence between thè poet of a poem and a poet in a poem; that there is a différence between the readers of a poem and the reader in a poem. The distinction between thè poet of thè poem and thè poet in his poem is familiär from English literature as Chaucer, the author of the Canterbury Taies, is distinguished from Chaucer the pilgrim within his poem. In Italian literature the distinction between Dante as the poet of his Divine Comedy and the pilgrim within it is equally familiär. For ancient prose fiction and Apuleius' Métamorphoses we now hâve the distinction between «auctor» and «actor»25. But for both modem criticism

22. «If he (an anonymous critic) were to say that poets in generai do not em- ploy formai démonstrations, either of themselves or of other characters ... (* ' ' ' ), ... he will command .. », Col. 1,11-16 Man- goni. Elizabeth Asmis makes a similar suggestion for what Philodemus claims in Col. 34.35-35.1 Magnoni, An Epicurean Survey of Poetic Theories (Philodemus on Poems 5, Cols. 26-36, «Class. Quart» 42, 1992, p. 410. The conception of characters () as part of an author's «material» extends to Proclus* commentary on Plato's Republic, vol. 1, pp. 6,7-12 and 16,26-19,25 Kroll. In the remarks that introduce his commentary, Proclus treats the occasion, setting, and characters of a Platonic dialogue as their «material» (). 23. For which there is the history of Robert C. Elliott, The Literary Persona, Chicago 1967.

24. A useful summary and anthology is Jane Thompkins, Reader-Response Cri- ticism: From Formalism to Post Structuralism, Baltimore, 1980.

25. Brilliantly set out by J. J. Winkler in his Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius 'Golden Ass\ Berkeley, 1985. I hâve studied the narrative



18 Diskin Clay

and its ancient antécédents this distinction is so novel that it required an entry in the supplément to the enlarged édition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics where we can also find headings for «Semiotics», «Structuralism», and «Swahili Poetry»26.

I shall not claim that there is nothing new under the sun. I intend rather to return our modern theory of thè literary persona, which I take as read, to ancient literary criticism - both implicit and explicit - in order to determine what analogues it had in antiquity. The more interesting project of this essay is to discover the cultural déterminants that made the ancient theory of thè poetic persona so différent from our modern théories of the literary persona. The authors who figure in this survey do not, with the exception of Longinus, consider prose fiction, and the writers who protest the biographical reading of their poems are all Roman poets. Yet in practice, Greek and Roman poets exploited thè persona of both the poet and that of his audience, or reader. One only has to re- cali the Convention of funerary inscriptions in which the de- ceased identifies himself (or the monument identifies itself) to an unknown passerby or the passerby enters into a dialogue with the person hidden under the monument, who is no

longer able to speak out or to respond. These are monuments of an age of literacy. Their epigram is composed by the epi- grammitist Lucillius, who wrote (AP XI 312)27:

, . .

2. Poets, actors, and their masks

The first of the distinctions we will meet in this survey come

persona of Lucian (created in part by his doubles) in Lucian of Samosata: Four

Philosophical Lives (Nignnus, Demonax, Peregnnus, Alexander Pseudomantis), ANRW II 365, Berlin. New York 1992, pp. 3406-3450.

26. Ed. Alex Preminger, Princeton 1974, pp. 959-961. Persona now assumes its

proper alphabetical piace in the 1993 édition of the Encyclopedia. 27. The lines are effectively cited by Guido Paduano, Chi dice «io» nelVepi- gramma ellenistico}, La componente autobiografica, p. 129. In this same collection, Luigi Spina's Autobiografie impossibili, pp. 163-178, is an appropriate sequel as a study of actual funerary epigrams.



The Tbeory of thè Literary Persona in Antiquity 19

from two Greek texts of the fourth Century . C, Plato's Re- public and Aristotle's Poetics. The distinction Piato and Aris- totle draw between a poet «himself» and his characters is not exactly new. It is strikingly présent in fourth Century dedicatory reliefs and the familiär scene of the tragic or comic poet contemplating thè masks of his repertory. So far as the audience is concerned, the more fundamental distinction is between thè actor and thè character he plays. This distinction is illustrated in the fragment of the mid-fourth Century Gnathia krater from Taranto now in the Martin von Wagner Museum in Würzburg (Figure 1). Hère a tragic actor with a stubble beard and close cropped hair and in costume contemplâtes the mask of the Thracian king whose character he will play. In the Peiraeus actors relief (Figure 2), which is perhaps contempo- rary with Euripides' Baccbae, the distinction between the

poet, his actors, and their masks is clear and indelible. The heroized poet sits on a couch holding a rhyton in his left hand. He contemplâtes three actors. One carries a mask; one holds up a tympanon, and the figure closest to the poet seems to be playing the rôle of a woman. The fragment of a relief of the comic poet in Lyme Park from c. 380 (Figure 3) shows a seated comic poet (possibly Aristophanes) contemplating two comic masks and silently and eloquently pointing to the distinction Piato was making at about the same time28. This relief has a striking and developed parallel in the marble relief of the first Century A. D. now in the British Museum. This shows a comic poet, who turns from his banquet couch to greet Dionysos and his retinue. The scene indicates a festival. Be- low the couch and table of the reclining and garlanded poet is a ehest containing four comic masks29. These distinctions are made without words. The Gnathia crater shows a tragic actor

contemplating his mask. The relief at Lyme Park shows a

28. The first two illustrations can be conveniently found in Arthur Pickard-

Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens2, Oxford 1968, Figures 51 (Pei- raeus relief) and 54a (Gnathia crater at Würzburg); the Lyme Park relief is shown as Figure 201 (page 48) of Margarete Bieber's The History of the Greek and Roman Theater2, Princeton 1961.

29. An illustration can be found in Richard Green and Eric Handley, Images of the Greek Theater, Austin 1995, Figure 44 (p. 73). The relief might hâve an original in the second Century . C. The fact that comedy and tragedy were masked drama has a crucial bearing on the practice of both tragedy and comedy. For this Helene P. Foley's The Masque of Dionysus, «Trans. Proc. Am. Phil. Ass.» 110,



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comic poet and his masks, which signify his actors as they wear these masks; the Peiraeus actors relief shows a poet, gaz- ing at his actors, who carry their masks. AU are distinct, yet associated. In the Würzburg crater the poet is only im- plied.

Figure 1: Gnathia crater, mid-fourth Century «Martin von Wagner Museum, Würzburg»

1980, pp. 107-133 is an excellent guide, as is the anthropological study of A. Da- vid Napier, Masks, Transformation, and Paradox, Berkeley, 1986.




Figure 2: Peiraeus actors relief, end of fifth Century «Athens, National Museum 1500»



22 Diskin Clay

Figure 3: Relief of comic poet, c. 380 «Lyme Park»



The Tbeory of thè Literary Persona in Antiquity 23

The first explicit attempt to distinguish a poet from his masks is that of Piato in the discussion of the content and the style of poetry in the Republic. This passage is now more familiär than it once was30. It cornes from book 3 of the Republic and Socrates' discussion of the style () as distinct from the content () of poetry. The terms of Socrates' essay in criticism decisively shaped Greek théories of style31. Socrates puts the question to Adeimantos: Do poets manage their narration () through unbroken narrative or through narrative as impersonation () or through both narrative and impersonation? These distinctions now seem obvious in light of their tradition in Greek rhetorical theory, but Adeimantos' difficulty with Socrates' terms alerts us to its novelty.

Socrates makes his meaning plainer by giving an example from the opening of the Iliad. He produces Homer's third person narrative of how Chryses approached Agamemnon and Menelaos to ransom his daughter {Iliad 1.9-16). This he contrasts with its immediate sequel (1.17-21), in which Homer shifts to his mimetic mode and gives Chryses' actual words of entreaty to the Greek army and its Commanders. Adeimantos seems to grasp Socrates' point from this example, but for the reader of modem prose fiction what is disquieting about Socrates' theory of narrative style is the conception of the

30. Thanks to the attention of G. R. F. Ferrari, Piato and poetry, in The Cam-

bridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 1 Classica! Criticism, Cambridge, 1989, pp. 92-148; more recently and briefly Penelope Murray, Piato on Poetry, Cam-

bridge 1995, pp. 3-6 (her comments on books 2, 3, and 10 of the Republic\ and

Christopher Janaway, Images of Excellence: Phto's Critique of the Arts, Oxford, 1995, Chapters 5 and 6.

31. Michael Haslam has shown how thèse distinctions apply to the Platonic

dialogues, PUto, Sophron, and the Dramatic Dialogue, «Bull. Inst. Class. Stud.» 19, 1972, pp. 17-38. The distinction is evident in the ancient commentaries to He- siod and Theocritus noted in sequel. The fact that all «literature» was read aloud and dramatically in the Greek context Piato addressed, means that ail of his dia-

logues should be considered «dramatic». Their reader takes the part of Socrates as narrator. It is precisely this feature of Plato's context that qualifies the success of Gérard Gennette's attempt to reduce Plato's concept of lexis to a tautology: «[T]he very notion of imitation on the level of lexis is a pure mirage The

only thing that language can imitate perfectly is language, or, to be more precise, a discourse can imitate perfectly only a perfectly identical discourse; in short, a discourse can imitate only itself. Qua lexis, direct imitation is simply a tauto-

logy», Frontiers of Narrative [1966], in Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York, 1982, p. 132.



24 Diskin Clay

poet himself (). Socrates sees Homer as speaking «himself» in the purely narrative opening of thè Iliadi «nor does he attempt to divert our minds to the thought that anyone other than he himself is speaking. In what follows these [narrative] Unes he speaks as if he were Chiyses himself, and does his ut- most to convince us that the speaker is not Homer, but the priest, who is an old man»32.

By «himself» {autos) Socrates clearly means the poet speaking as the narrator of his poetry, and not as thè persona he projects into his poetry. That is, the distinction between Homer as narrator and Homer as Chryses does not allow for a distinction between Homer as the poet outside of the poem and Homer as a narrative voice or a variety of narrative voices within the poem. Homer's only other guise is that of an actor in the rôle of Chryses or another of his characters. This and not his narrative persona is the means to his concealment or effacement: «Now, if the poet were never to conceal himself, he would deliver ail of his poetry without acting or impersonation (mimesis) and it would qualify as pure narrative»33.

Aristotle displays this same conception of Homeric narrative style in thè Poetics, when he distinguishes between Homer as he speaks himself (autos) and Homer as he assumes speaking parts within his narrative. The modem critic and reader again asks why Aristotle can so easily identify Hom- er's narrative voice with the voice of Homer himself. There are three passages in the Poetics where Aristotle seems to replicate thè distinctions of Republic 3. They give us no new understanding of what Socrates meant by Homer speaking as «himself»34. Although he gives mimesis a status it never attains in the Platonic dialogues, Aristotle expresses a distinct prefer-

32. " - " , - , Resp. 3,393A. Homer «himself», or his narrative voices and modes, is the object of the study of Scott Richardson, The Homenc Narrato^ Nashville, 1990.

33. Eì , , Resp. 3,393C-D.

34. These are:

1 3,1448*19-22 Kassel: . -




enee for dramatic or mimetic poetry35. He establishes a three- fold distinction among thè subjects, medium, and style of imitative poetry. As for style, a poet can imitate thè same subjects in thè same medium, but in différent modes. That is, a poet represents heroes (subject), in the dactylic hexameter (medium), in three différent modes: 1 as a narrator who assumes no other rôle than that of narrator; 2 as the narrator when he assumes the rôle of his characters, as does Homer; and 3 as a poet who represents (for he can no langer imper- sonate) the men who are the objects of his imitation in action - obviously the case of drama. This, at least, is how I interpret Aristotle's meaning in his third distinction.

Aristotle returns to thèse distinctions as he characterizes Homer as not only a serious poet who wrote well, but as a serious poet who was in some sensé a dramatist (Poetics 4.1448b32-36). In one last comment on the epic (Poetics 24.1460a5-ll), Aristotle praises Homer again for his dramatic rejection of his narrative self - that is, for his récognition of what the poet should do (, not «write») himself: «The poet himself should speak as little as possible. For in this, he is not an imitator (). Now, other poets dramatize themselves throughout their entire recitations. But seldom and in only a few cases are they imitators. But, when he has recited his short proem [Iliad 1.1-17, exactly the passage Socrates adduces in Republic 3], Homer immediately introduces a man or a woman or some other character () and none of them out of character but ail are convincing». What is striking about ail

" , "!".

2 4,1448b32-36 . " ( - ) ...

3 24,146035-11:

, "

, ' , " , ' ' .

35. Yet a préférence for the dramatic mode of discourse is expressed in Adei- mantos* unexpected préférence for the «pure imitator of a décent character»

(Resp. 3,397D), a préférence that seems quite forgotten in the remarks that open Republic 10.



26 Diskin Clay

thèse passages is Aristotle's clear restriction of mimesis to the dramatic mode of poetry. An early translator and exegete of the Poetics described this mode as «Personative Poetry»36. It has been estimated that as much of one fifth of the Homeric

poems is dramatic or «mimetic»37. By contrast, the narrator, as

performer, can only be himself; he cannot «personate» what he already is38.

The first of Aristotle's three comments on Homer as speaking in a dramatic mode is difficult for us. It requires an act of cultural translation to grasp the context in which his meaning becomes clear. In the public and dramatic context of Homer

reciting () his poetry, one can recover what it means for Homer to recite the narrative of thè Iliad or

Odyssey «himself», and what it means for him to assume the

part of one of his epic characters - that is, to become someone eise and to «personate» a character. Homer's audience could never doubt who Homer was himself: he stood there before them singing the wrath of Achilles.

Aristotle's third mode of poetic présentation cannot belong to the epic, for in it there is no narrator and all the poet's characters are engaged in action; nor is it mixed. This mode is

pure drama, or a form of imitation like the Sokratikoi logoi or the Sophronic mime. In this mode, the poet «conceals himself» completely and nowhere speaks in his own person. If this is the case, a distance opens between the poet or imitative artist and his work as it is enacted autonomously. And it is

precisely in this gap that we should expect to detect our modern notion of the literary persona and the analogue to the ancient représentations of thè Greek tragic or comic poet con-

templating his masks. But hère again the cultural context in

36. Aryeh Kosman helpfully cites Thomas Twining's comments in his Aristo- tle's Treatise on Poetry Translated (London, 1789, reprinted New York, 1971), Acting: Drama as the Mimesis of Praxis, in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty ed., Essays on Aristotle's Poetics, Princeton 1992, p. 53.

37. Samuel Bassett, The Poetry of Homer, Berkeley, 1938, pp. 59-64.

38. When Porphyry speaks in his Homeric Questions of what Homer said himself and in his own person ( ' , , in Quaest. Hom. in //. 100.5-7 Schraeder), his meaning is that of «narratorial» control, as James I. Porter has pointed out, Hermeneutic Lines and Circles: Aristarchus and Crates on the Exegesis of Homer, Homer's Ancient Readers, ed. Robert Lamberton and

John J. Keaney, Princeton 1992, pp. 78-79.




which Aristotle developed his concept of imitative poetry strictly limits his sensé of still other possible modes of poetic présentation.

A passage in Aristotle's Rhetoric helps restore this context: even in the third category of poets imitating in an entirely dramatic mode, the poet seems to be présent as an actor in his drama, unlike Euripides, or Sophron, or Piato. In his discussion of style () in the third book of the Rhetoric (1403b21- 24 Kassel), Aristotle claims that the study of the style of deliv- ery came late to tragedy and the public recitations of the epic, «for at first the poets of tragedy were themselves actors»39. So possibly, even as he is masked as an actor, and even as he per- forms in the purely dramatic mode of imitative poetry, the Greek poet was at first présent to the audience as an actor behind a mask and not a beguiling and elusive absence, as he is in the Gnathia crater in Würzburg, where we can see only the actor and his mask. There is only one occasion in which a Greek tragic poet appeared before his audience as himself: this is during the , or preliminary ceremony of the day before the dramatic festival began, when poet and actors appeared before their audience, the actors without their masks40.

What Socrates' discussion of style in the Republic shows, and what Aristotle's theory of imitative poetry confirms, is the simple fact that, in its beginnings in the fourth Century, Greek theory had no real conception of the literary persona. The Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of the guises and disguises of the poet are alien to our modem conception of the poet - or narrator - as he fashions «himself» within his poem. For in the Greek context, the poet himself is not absent

39. That is, the poets did not need to instruct their actors. The text is: , , ' , . . For the évidence on which we can evaluate Aristotle's statement, see Pickard-Cambridge, Dramatic Festivals2, p. 93 and p. 130 n. 4 and P.

Ghiron-Bistagne, Les Acteurs dans h Grèce Antique, Lille 1976, pp. 151- 157.

40. What is known of this event from fourth Century texts is set out in Pickard-

Cambridge, Dramatic Festivals2, Oxford 1968, pp. 67-69. The scholion to Ae- schin., In Ctes. 67 provides the information that the actors did not appear in masks or costumes.



28 Diskin Clay

from his text. Rather, the image of the rhapsode stands before Aristotle as he appeared, like Plato's Ion of Ephesos, in the festivals of Athens and dramatically recited, with staff in hand and in his magnificent costume, thè narrative sections of the Iliad and Odyssey and played the parts of Chryses and Agamemnon41. Aristotle could envisage the early tragedians not as authors remote from the texts they had created but as acting in the dramas they had composed. Unlike Aristotle, Piato glimpsed and hinted at the possiblility that the poet could conceal or disguise himself in his characters, as he did himself in his purely dramatic dialogues (Republic 3,393C11).

3. The poet and his page

The Roman situation is différent from the Greek, but both the Greek and Roman situations are very différent from our own expérience as silent readers of closet poetry and prose. The change is already evident in the Century after Aristotle. Posei- dippos, in the poem Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones has called his seal, expresses the wish that he will survive as a statue in the agora of Pella, «unrolling a book». If the seated statue of a poet with a papyrus roll in thè Stanza delle Statue of the Vatican represents Poseidippos of Pella and not Poseidippos of Kassan- dreia, the contrast with the seated statue of «Archilochos» in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek is striking. The archaic poet is intensely engaged in the performance of his poetry; the Hel- lenistic poet languidly holds a book roll in his right hand42. The advent of literacy and the book and the development of

41. Such a performance is vividly evoked by John Herington, Poetry into Drama: Early Tragedy and the Greek Poetic Tradition, Berkeley, 1985, pp. 10-15.

42. Supplementun Hellenisticum, éd. H. Lloyd Jones and P. Parsons, Berlin and New York, 1983, 705. The poem is well treated by Lloyd-Jones in The Seal of Posidippus, «Journ. Hell. Stud.» 83, 1983, pp. 75-99 (The Académie Papers of Sir

Hugh Lloyd-Jones: Greek Comedy, Hellenistic Literature, Greek Religion, and Miscellanea, Oxford, 1990, pp. 158-195). As for his statue, Matthew Dickie has made a convincing case for removing it from the comic poet from Kassandreia and giving it to Posidippus of Pella, the epigrammatist, Which Posidippus?, «Gk. Rom. Byz. Stud.» 35, 1994, pp. 373-383. For «Poseidippos», see the documenta- tion in G. M. A. Richter, Portraits of the Greeks, London 1965, vol. 2, pp. 238-




libraries changea the fundamental conditions of poetic pro- duction, just as it radically transformed the relation between a poet and his audience. The term «audience» is ambiguous, now that we have lost its original meaning. Horace, for example, can say of Homer that he transports his audience into the middle of his narrative (in médias res ... auditor em rapit), but he does so in a verse epistle addressed to the Pisones (Ars Po- etica 148-149) of which they were not auditores but lectores. Smith Palmer Bovie's translation of auditorem as «reader» is inaccurate to the social context of Horace, in which poetry was read aloud; it is also a symptom of our âge of literacy43. Roman readers performed the poetry they read, and poetry continued to be recited before small groups and performed before large groups. We are reminded of this by the funerary monument of Q. Sulpicius Maximus who recited Greek poetry at thè Capitoline contest of 94 A. D. at the âge of eleven (Figure 4). Although he holds a papyrus roll in his left hand, he does not read from it44. On the left edge of the deep niche in which he stands is inscribed the Greek text of thè poem he recited, which would have been read aloud - if discretely - by a few of the passers-by on the Via Salaria. But, as for what both Piato and Aristotle refer to as the poet «himself», the papyrus rôle or parchment transforms the dramatic présence of thè performer into a text, or, nostalgically, in the cases of Martial's apophoreta> into the painted portrait of the poet as the frontispiece to a présentation copy of his book of poetry. By metonymy the writer is transformed into the book itself. In a présentation copy, Livy is reduced to small characters

239 (Figs. 1647-1650); for «Archilochos» (who I take to be Archilochos), vol. 1, pp. 66-67 (Figs. 231-232). 43. The Satires and Epistles of Horace, Chicago 1959, p. 277.

44. Rome, Museo Nuovo Capitolino, illustration from The Cambridge History of Classical Literature II: Roman Literature, Cambridge 1982, Plate II. Accor-

ding to the inscription, the young Quintus' performance was «spontaneous» -

this we can doubt - and his thème (Zeus 's rebuke to Helios for giving the reigns of his chariot to his son) was suggested by his audience. The Greek text of his 43 line epyllion is inscribed on the left edge of the large aitar in which he is sculpted in deep relief, IGUR 1336 Moretti. Covering the large subject of literacy and

performance are E. J. Kenney's chapter on Books and readers in the Roman world, Cambridge History of Classical Literature II, pp. 3-32 and its counterpart in Bernard Knox's Books and readers in the Greek World, The Cambridge Hi-

story of Classical Literature I: Greek Literature, Cambridge 1985, pp. 1-41.



30 Diskin Clay

transcribed onto fine parchment: pellibus exiguis artatur Livius ingens (14,190)45.

In this age of books and readers, Persius writes from his own closet to the closet of a potential reader: scribimus inclusi {Satire 1,13). And, when Martial writes the poem that introduces his first book of epigrams, he can speak of himself as his book: Hic est quem legis ille, quem requins I toto notus in orbe Martialis (1,1,1-2). Martial is his book, and his reader can find «him» at the bookshop of Secundus, in a small boxed édi- tion (1,2). The reiterated claim ille ego, qui is the expression of this age of reading. The poet, famous only from his books, will be recognized as the poet of still another book46.

Literacy and thè ancient book opened a gap between a poet and his audience, and the absence of the performing poet is filled by thè mask or persona of the writer. Contemplating this mask is the unfamiliar mask of the reader. Both are the créations and necessities of wide-spread literacy. It is true that poetry was commonly recited in Rome. For this we have the testimony of Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Pliny, Tacitus, and Suetonius47. But even when poetry had become the private and secluded transaction between a reader and a book, poetry

45. Epigrams 14,183-195 are a collection of dedicatory inscriptions. The same coneeit is applied to Vergili Quam brevis immensum cepit membrana Maronem I

ipsius vultus prima tabella gerit, 186. Such portraits are beautifully illustrated by the frontispiece to the comédies of Terence showing Terence in a medallion and flanked by two actors wearing comic masks, Vat. lat. 3868, f. 4v (tenth Century, in Illustration: Ten centuries of illustration from thè most precious medieval and Renaissance Codices in existence, ed. G. Morello, Rome 1996, p. 76). 46. The most famous case of this formula is the four line signature opening the Aeneid in some late mss. of the poem. In arguing against their authenticity, R. G. Austin Covers most cases of this formula, «Class. Quart.» N. S. 18, 1968, pp. 107- 115 (pp. 110-111 especially), including the instance in Martial and Ovid, Am. 2. 1,1-2. 47. Gibbon gives an appropriately satirical notice of thè fate of the Roman tra-

gic poet: «In the time of Quintilian and Pliny, a tragic poet was reduced to the

imperfect method of hiring a great room, and reading his play to the Company whom he invited for that purpose (see Dialog, de Oratoribus, c. 9, 11, and Plin.

Epistol. vii, 17)», Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. Bury, London, 1909, vol. 3 p. 323 n. 84. JuvenaFs characterization of the périls of Rome is apt and notorious: et Augusto recitantes mense poetas (Juv. 3,9). The most telling évi- dence cornes from Pliny, Ep. 1,13 (with Sherwin-White's commentary). The Ro- man situation is studied by A. M. Guillemin. Le publique et L· vie littéraire à Rome, Paris 1937. For readers rather than audience we now have the contribu-



The Theory of the Liter ary Persona in Antiquity 31

Figure 4: Funerary monument of Q, Sulpicius Maximus «Rome, Museo Nuovo Capitolino»

tions to J. G. F. Powell and A. J. Woodman, Authors and Audience in Roman Li- terature, Cambridge, 1992.



32 Diskin Clay

was read aloud; and, by a psychology well known to Piato, thè reader of the book impersonated the absent poet as he became for a moment the «I» of the poem he was reciting or, in thè case of a dramatic poet, he took the parts of his characters.

In their fundamental attitudes, Roman readers were not unlike Greek readers in the age of performed and public poetry. The poet was as he presented himself in his book. Take the case of the first Roman poet who émerges as both a striking personality and a writer, who, by his use of thè verse epistle, remained absent from his audience48. Lucilius has struck readers from Horace to the aged Goethe as a confessional poet. Horace, in his Satires (2,1,30-34), gives us an unforgettable reading of Lucilius as he presented himself in his books of poetry:

ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim credebat libris, neque si male cesserat usquam decurrens alio, neque si bene; quo fit ut omnis votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella vita senis ...

This is an antique version of Goethe's présentation of his own poetry and life in Dichtung and Wahrheit. Indeed, these lines stand as an epigraph to Goethe's late Zahme Xenien49. In the remains of Lucilius, Goethe discovered «fragments of a great confession» (Bruchstücke einer grossen Konfession), or better the fragments of very small and personal confidences. Lucil- ius, for Horace at least, entrusted his personal secrets (arcana) to his books, as if they were his dosest friends, and his open- ness and sincerity are that of an old man commiting his life's history on a votive tablet dedicated to a god. But there is another manner of reading Lucilius' satires, and this is Horatian, not in what Horace explicitly says about Lucilius in his satires

48. Even the studied style of the epistle was thought to reveal character, not rhetorical ethos. Demetrius in his treatise On Style says of the letter that it reveals «an image of the soul» of the writer ( , Eloc. 227). 49. Aptly adduced by Eduard Fraenkel in his Horace Oxford 1957, 152; he goes on to cite the familiär passage from Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit recalled in note 7 above.




but in the practice of the personae Horace adopts in his own satires.

In the following Century, Catullus was the first Roman poet (and so far as I can judge the first ancient poet) to protest that he could not be read in his book and to disassociate himself from his poetry. His déclaration of independence from his poetry cornes in that essay in criticism addressed to two of his readers, Furius and Aurelius. Furius and Aurelius hâve committed the same grievous fault that almost all readers of poetry committed throughout antiquity. They committed the li- bel of confusing the poet with his libellas. Catullus protests that even the poet of non serious poetry like his Vivamus, mea Lesbia (c. 5) must be pure and prudent himself (c. 16: Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo). Catullus uses the pronoun ipse in making this protest: nam castum esse decet pium poetam I ipsum (c. 16.5-6). The pronoun ipsum is not the sign of the présence of a poet, as it was in Piato and Aristotle; it is the sign of his absence. Catullus présents his verse as autonomous, and most importantly, he présents Furius and Au- relius as readers {quod ... legistis, c. 16.12-13). Clearly, they are readers who will pay the penalty for their vile biographical habit of criticism and their incautious conclusion that the poet is «no real man» {male marem). If they are right, they hâve nothing to fear. But, if they are wrong: Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo.

Catullus is not an epic poet performing before an audience and describing and taking the part of men in action; he is a lyric poet dramatizing his own life in a poem. But is this life his own? The distinction he insists on is between Catullus the poet in his life outside of his poetry and Catullus as he appears within his poetry. We should not forget that he makes this distinction in a poem, and, by this very gesture, removes the grounds of his argument. The distinction is so severe that his poetry and by implication the Catullus of his poetry are presented as autonomous. This was, I would argue, a distinction that was unavailable to a culture dominated by public and performed poetry.

Catullus had his successors in Roman poetry, just as Furius and Aurelius had theirs as readers of poetry. His most impressive successor is Ovid, who had Augustus for a reader. As Ovid imagines his situation, Augustus seems to hâve read sure



34 Diskin Clay

signs of a licentious life in OvicTs amatory poetry. To this severe and censorious mode of interprétation Ovid protests in his long letter of apology to Augustus. Here is the disclaimer that most concerns us (Tristia 2,353-60):

crede mihi, distant mores a carminé nostro (vita verecunda est, Musa iocosa mea)

355 magna pars mendax operum est et ficta meorum; plus sibi permisit compositore suo.

nec liber indicium est animi, sed honesta voluntas: plurima mulcendis auribus apta feres.

Accius esset atrox, conviva Terentius esset, 360 essent pugnaces qui fera bella canunt.

Another successor to Catullus in this kind of apology pro poesi sua is Martial. In his elegy to Domitian, who then held the office of censor, he asks the emperor to relax and read his verse with the lightheartedness it requires: Usava est nobis

pagina, vita proba. (Epigrams 1,4,8). This is my final example for the disassociation of a poet from his page in Roman poetry. AU my examples come from amatory poets - lusores amoris. The protests voiced by none of these poets seem to have convinced its audience. The habit and attraction of a

voyeuristic reading of erotic poetry were too powerful. Au-

gustus, if he ever read Ovid's verse epistle, remained unmoved

by it. Both Ovid and Propertius became fabulae with their readers and contempories {Amores 3,1,5 and Propertius 2,24al-2), as art was taken to imitate life. As for Martial, one modern account of his claim to a life of purity {vita verecunda) is severe: «This must mean (as Martial was a sensualist of the grossest kind) that his life had not received any censo- rial notice»50.

50. Paley and Stone, M. Valent Martialis Epigrammata Selecta, London 1868, quoted in Peter Howell in A Commentary on Book One of the Epigrams of Mar- tial, London 1980, p. 116. Howell also calls attention to Martial 11.15.13 (mores non habet hic meos libellus) and Pliny's statement of the «law» (legem) Catullus

expressed with violence in e. 16 (Letter 4,14,5). His other références are equally relevant. Apuleius recalls Hadrian's epitaph on the poet Voconius (Uscivus versHy mente pudicus eras) in Apology 1 1 . Only the censorious critics insist on a

biographical reading of poetry, as does Seneca, EpistuUe 114,3. On the Greek side there is the obscène and late iambic poem in Cod. Vat. Barb. gr. 69 f.lO4r




4. Personae

The indignant language of Catullus, Ovid, and Martial is not our own. They contrasted the poet himself in his life outside of his poetry with his poetry - versiculi, liber, or pagina. The word persona in our literary sensé of the term occurs only in late authors such as Diomedes and Servius. One of the well attested meanings of persona is that of a f alsely assumed character or pretense (Giare, OLD 2d.)51. Persona in the sensé of a character introduced into a poem does occur in rhetorical writings. In describing the narrative and didactic mode of poetry, the grammarian Diomedes (4th Century A. D.) claims that in this mode: «the poet speaks himself without the inter- vention of another persona (or character), as is the case of the first three books of the Georgics and the beginning of the fourth [up to the drama of the epyllion of Aristaeus which be- gins at 321] and the poem of Lucretius and other similar poems»52.

Diomedes was not a careful reader of Lucretius, but his term persona supplies thè word that has been missing from the theory of the genres of poetic présentation as it was estab- lished by Piato. One can put the situation in terms of a paradox: strictly narrative and third person poetry is personal in

which ends by proclaiming that thè poet's life and Muse are chaste (16-17), lambì et Elegi Graeci2 vol. 1, Archilochus 328 West.

51. In Lucretius, persona is both a mask (thè creta persona of 4,297) and a social

pretense, that can be unmasked: eripitur persona, manet res, 3,58. In Martial, Epi- grams 3,43, we find this same sensé of persona:

Mentiris iuvenem tinctis, Laetine, capillis. iam subito corvus, qui modo cycnus eras.

non omnes fallis; seit te Proserpina canum:

personam capiti detrahet illa tuo. Martial's phrase in the last line seems an allusion to the Lucilius of Horace, who strips the victims of his satire of their skin (detrahere et pellem, Horace, Satires II 1,64). res, 3,58. In Martial, Epigrams 3,43, we find this same sensé of persona: The character of the social persona is best described by Cicero in his De Officiis, especially 1,107-121. This, of course, leads directly to the conception of all hu- man life as a play, documented in E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages [1948], trans. Willard R. Trask, New York 1953, pp. 138-144.

52. exegeticon est vel enarrativum, in quo poeta ipse loquitur sine ullius personae interlocutione, ut se habent très Georgia et prima pars quartiy item Lucreti car- mina et cetera his similia, Diomedes, Keil, Gramm. Lat. vol. 1, p. 482.20:



36 Diskin Clay

that it involves the poet «himself»; but it is impersonal in that it dispenses with the masks and disguises of dramatic poetry. The term persona is used by ancient critics, but for Diomedes, Vergil remained Vergil throughout most of the Georgics and Lucretius remained Lucretius throughout the entire De Re- rum Natura. The author in the book was the author of the book. This distinction hardly catches sight of thè persona of an addressee or a reader. There is another meaning of persona and in both Greek and Latin. This describes the «person» in the verb53. When Longinus speaks of a dramatic style of literature (of both poetry and prose), he notes how Herodotus can appeal to his reader as if he were présent, just as he himself often turns to address his own reader, Postu- mius Terentianus. But his example from Herodotus (Historiés 2,29,2-6) and his term , or «vivid», are vestiges of the earlier era of public performance54. Such a performance or long séries of performances was Herodotus' reading from his Historiés in Athens - a performance Thucydides disparaged as a «compétition to be heard [and presumably enjoyed] for the moment»55.

We now move from «Longinus» to four last exhibits and a conclusion. In his Prolegomena to Hesiod's Works and Days, Proclus rehearses the main distinctions first articulated by Piato, and he identifies the genre of this the earliest purely didactic poem in Greek literature: «Narrative (or «reporting») poetry is the genre in which only the poet speaks - as is the case of the entire Works and Days; dramatic poetry is the genre in which the poet appears nowhere; and the mixed genre is that in which the poet both speaks [himself] and char-

53. Thus, the term for the infinitive is modus impersonativus, Diomedes, Keil, Gramm. Lat., vol 2. p. 340,37 Keil. Varrò states the System of three personae in

Ling.y 7,8,2. The term , meaning person in the verb, is found in Dio-

nysius Thrax 638,4 Bekker-Uhlig and Apollonius Dyscolus, Pron., 3,12 Schnei- der.

54. ' , [] , [Longinus], Subi. 26,1-2 Russell: After producing examples from Homer, Aratus, and Hesiod, he turns to his addressee, Postumius Terentianus, and adduces Herodotus' address to his reader: , , ; 55. , Thucydides, 1,22,4; FGrHist 2,360 (Synkellos, Plutarch, De Malignitate § 26).




acters () are introduced who enter into dialogue, as is the case of the Iliad»56. Hère we hâve thè word, , but thè literary persona éludes us. The fact remains that the theory of style created by Piato allowed for the author as an im- personator only in the mixed genre of epic poetry. But, as we hâve seen, Aristotle could imagine a situation in which the tragedian was both poet and actor.

The theory of narrative and dramatic style was, however, extended to the new genre of bucolic poetry, which came to be regarded as a mixed genre, like epic. Sometimes it is narrative poetry; sometimes dramatic poetry; at times it is mixed. Accordingly, we rediscover a Platonic characterization of the style of Theocritus' bucolic poetry in an introduction to The Idylls of Theocritus: «The dramatic genre never exhibits the character () of the poet; the narrative genre reveals it throughout; and the mixed genre exhibits it at some times and not in others»57. How should the term be translated hère? Is it a character or the disguise of the literary persona? Other of this critic's introductory remarks to Theocritus help, for in their metaphorical language they suggest that the term is conceived as a mask or a disguise: «In ail thèse modes, [this poetry] casts in its mold the character of the rustics and characterizes their blunt farm-yard language in a wonderfully charming way»58. Clearly, the refined Theocri-

56. Prolegomeni ad Hesiodi Opera (cited in Gudeman, Anstoteles Poetica, Ber- lin and Leipzig, 1934, p. 104): () * ' . - (, ) . ...

, ^ - . For Proclus in the scholia of the mss. of Hesiod's Work and Days, see A. Pertusi in Aevum 25, 1951, pp. 147-179, Scholia V etera in Hesiodi Opera et Dies, Milan 1955, and M. L. West's discussion, Hesiod: Works and Days (note 2 above), pp. 68-70.

57. , , , , Scholia in Theocritum vetera, Prolegomena D, p. 11 Wendel:

58. * , .

- , , - ), , , . ' , ,



38 Diskin Clay

tus forced at least one ancient critic (very possibly Proclus) to regard thè persona of thè civilized bucolic poet as a kind of genial comic mask. Perhaps this is as close as we can come in ancient rhetorical theory to the notion of the literary persona of the poet. The reciprocai theory of thè persona of the addressee or reader does not readily emerge from two of the three modes of the ancient theory of the characteres of poetry. It is excluded from thè dramatic mode by the fact that character addresses character (although in both comedy and tragedy actors address their audience and in comedy the chorus address the audience on behalf of the poet). It is excluded too from the epic, except in Homeric and Hesiodic apostrophe. It is only possible in the theory of narrative and specifically of didactic poetry.

In Servius' commentary to the beginning of the third book of VirgiPs Georgics we hâve for the first and only time in ancient rhetorical theory (so far as I can discover) a discussion that combines the persona (in a sensé to be determined) of both the author and the addressee: «These books», Servius writes, «are didactic. For this reason they must be addressed [his word is scribantur] to someone. For instruction requires thè persona of both a teacher and a pupil. So [Vergil] writes to Maecenas, just as Hesiod [wrote] to Perses, and Lucretius to Memmius»59. There is no hint in this that any of the persons named are anything more than the actual poet as he takes on the rôle of the teacher or the reader as he adopts the rôle of the disciple. Ail seem historical figures and not the rhetorical créations of the poet.

There is one last exhibit in this inquest into the ancient theory of the literary persona. It seems to go against the ténor of the testimony gathered for the standing of the author and his addressee in a genre that would, as it appeared to a critic like Diomedes, seem to be purely narrative - a genre in which the poet speaks «himself» and without the intervening speech of another, sine ullius personae interlocutione. We discover this

' , Scholia in Theocritum, p. 4-5 Wendel.

59. Hi libri didascalia sunt unde necesse est ut ad aliquem scribantur; nam prae- ceptum et doctoris et discipuli personam requirit. unde ad Maecenatem scribit, si- cut Hesiodus ad Persen, Lucretius ad Memmium, Servius, prooemium ad Georgi- cos III 1.129 Thilo.



The Theory of the Literary Persona in Antiquity 39

criticai attitude in the hypothesis of the ancient commentaries to Hesiod's Works and Days: «Hesiod [introduced Perses] by fashioning a dramatic character () and taking it from his brother Perses, either because it was true to life or because it was plausible as a character and suited Hesiod's intention, in order to avoid making this dramatically implausible and to make it seem that he had come to this pass because of a quar- rel that involved his brother»60.

In this inquest into the theory of the literary persona in antiquity, we have followed a single rather meager vein: what ancient critics had to say about the relation of poet to his audience and what Roman poets had to say about the relation of their poetry to their lives. Rhetorical critics were well aware of how important the projection of a character was to the success of a speech and the theory of has a long career that is parallel to, but does not intersect, the lines of inquiry we have been following61. If there is a end to this search for an ancient theory of the literary persona, it is to be found not in ancient literary criticism but in our increasing awareness of the practice of the poets who created personae within their poetry for their own rhetorical purposes and who also created a persona for their reader. A search of ancient criticai theory for any real équivalents of our concepts of the literary personae of author and reader is frustrated by the liminal awareness in antiquity of distinctions that now seem of great and accepted importance in the interprétation of poetry and of

60. , '

xf\ , , Scholia vetera ad Hesiodi Opera et Dies, Pertusi, p. 3.13.

61. In thè Pbaedr. 271A-272B, Socrates is quite aware that the words of the orator should be adjusted to the souls of those he addresses. But it was Aristotle who insisted on , the projected by a speaker, as an élément of persuasion, along with the argument and émotion he créâtes in his audience (Rh. 1,2,3- 6). In Rh. 2,12-17 he enlarges on how the ethos of the speaker should harmonize with the character of his audience. Christopher Gill has given a brief assessment of the career of two of thèse éléments of persuasion in «The Ethos/Pathos Di- stinction in Rhetorical and Literary Criticism», «Class. Quart.» N. S. 34, 1984, pp. 149-166. Ethos is the subject of Wilhelm Süss's, Ethos: Studien zur älteren

griechischen Rhetorik, Leipzig and Berlin, 1910. The praxis of this theory in Ci- cero's orations is treated by James M. May in Trials of Character: The Eloquence of Ciceronian Ethos, Chapel Hill 1988.



40 Diskin Clay

prose fiction especially. We do discover thè terms and persona in some late commentaries, but thè thing éludes us, except for a bald and unelaborated statement in the scbolia to Theocritus and a comment about Perses in the scholia to Hesiod's Works and Days. Eripitur persona, manet res. But the very limited awareness of our concepts in the ancient critics and commentators is significant in itself, for it defines re- ciprocally our culture of the book and its silent reader and absent author. It is the product of an earlier âge of public and performed poetry.

In its origins in Piato and the theory of the three styles of poetic présentation, the ancient theory that distinguishes a poet as he speaks himself and as he speaks as a «personator» could not easily accommodate itself to thè thought of a poet projecting a persona imo his poem. In the poetry with which Piato and Aristotle were most familiär, the poet stood before his audience, in ail of his festival splendor and dramatic prés- ence. The magnetic field that linked Ion's audience to the rhapsode, then to Homer, and finally to Homer's Muse did not yet extend to the poet's reader62.

Duke Università

62. In Socrates' conceit, Ion 533D-E. At the conclusion of this essay, begun as I

investigateci the context in which Lucretius* «Memmius» might be regarded as a rhetorical persona, I would like to thank Richard Lamberton for advice on an

early version; Elizabeth Asmis for advice on a still later version; and Graziano

Arrighetti for prompting me to enlarge my horizons in this last and necessarily elliptical version.



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