Table Of ContentAdrian Gramps
The Fiction of Occasion in Hellenistic and Roman Poetry
Trends in Classics –
Supplementary Volumes
Edited by
Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos
Associate Editors
Stavros Frangoulidis · Fausto Montana · Lara Pagani
Serena Perrone · Evina Sistakou · Christos Tsagalis
Scientific Committee
Alberto Bernabé · Margarethe Billerbeck
Claude Calame · Jonas Grethlein · Philip R. Hardie
Stephen J. Harrison · Stephen Hinds · Richard Hunter
Christina Kraus · Giuseppe Mastromarco
Gregory Nagy · Theodore D. Papanghelis
Giusto Picone · Alessandro Schiesaro
Tim Whitmarsh · Bernhard Zimmermann
Volume 118
Adrian Gramps
The Fiction of
Occasion in
Hellenistic and
Roman Poetry
ISBN 978-3-11-073699-1
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-073160-6
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-073164-4
ISSN 1868-4785
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021936228
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
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Foreword
The aim of this book is to devise a method for approaching the problem of pres-
ence in Hellenistic and Roman poetry. The problem of presence, as defined here,
is the problem of the availability or accessibility to the reader of the fictional
worlds disclosed by poetry. Responding to the problem of presence, it is argued,
is an integral part of the experience of reading Hellenistic and Roman poetry, and
theorising this problem is essential if we are to approach an understanding of the
experience of poetic reading (and yet the act of theorising cannot ultimately be
dissociated from the poetic experience itself). ‘The fiction of occasion’ is proposed
as a new conceptual tool for approaching the problem of presence in a more im-
mediate and positive way than is possible with the methods and frameworks cur-
rently prevalent in the field. Its purpose is to elucidate how poetry can produce
aesthetic effects of presence without relying on narrativity.
The introduction offers an exposition in medias res of the problem of pres-
ence by way of Catullus c. 4, which features a boat inexplicably endowed with
the power of speech and delivering a discourse in a radically underdetermined
context. This prompts the question of how a reader can possibly imagine herself
in relation to this anomalous act of speech, which in turn serves as a preface to
the problem of presence.
Chapter 1, ‘Rethinking mimetic poetry and Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo’, in-
terrogates the theory of ‘mimetic poetry’ as applied to its central exemplar, Cal-
limachus’ Hymn to Apollo. This serves as an occasion to survey the current status
of the problem of presence in the study of Hellenistic and Roman poetry and to
thereby chart the conceptual territory which the idea of the fiction of occasion is
meant to occupy. The discussion concludes by advocating a move away from cer-
tain narratological precepts as well as from the dichotomy of orality and literacy,
and a turn towards a new appreciation of the structural role of epiphany in this
and similar poems.
Chapter 2, ‘Figuring occasion in Propertius 4.6 and Bion’s Adonis’, takes the
two poems named in its title as examples of how the fiction of occasion works
through sustained formal devices, or ‘figures’. Propertius 4.6 uses the figure of
the path of song to guide the reader through the experience of mentally surveying
the monumental space of the bay of Actium. Bion’s Lament for Adonis, on the
other hand, employs refrain-like repetitions and plaintive apostrophes to coax
the reader into a kind of sympathetic communion with the bereaved Aphrodite at
the moment of her lover Adonis’ death.
Chapter 3, ‘Occasion and presence in Horace, Odes I’, takes a focussed look
at a single poet, using poems 9, 12, and 20 of the first book of Odes to elucidate
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110731606-202
VI Foreword
Horace’s specifically lyric approach to the fiction of occasion. The key argument
here is that Horace finds a way to articulate the problem of presence dialectically,
so that competing modes of presence can be felt within the frame of a single
poem.
Chapter 4, ‘Occasioning the choral in Horace, Odes IV’, turns from the first to
the last book of Horatian lyric, which is preoccupied at a number of key junctures
with the idea of choral song or other forms of collective voicing. This chapter
feeds this often-noted peculiarity of the final book of Odes directly into the fiction
of occasion, arguing through readings of odes 1, 2, 5, 6, and 15 that what these
poems are really concerned with is the fantasy of the collective voice as a privi-
leged node of lyric presence.
Finally, the conclusion offers a recap of some of the central goals which unify
each of the discussions, followed by a prospectus of possible futures to which the
ideas pursued in this book may potentially lead.
Contents
Foreword V
Introduction IX
Rethinking Mimetic Poetry and Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo 1
. Introduction 1
. The Hymn to Apollo and ‘mimetic poetry’ 2
. Discourse and events 5
. The space of inclusion 8
. Mimesis and diegesis: from modes of presentation to experiential
frames 13
. Fictionality and epiphany 20
. Mimesis and the oral 24
. The ‘epiphanic effect’ and the fiction of occasion 28
. Conclusion 32
Figuring Occasion in Propertius 4.6 and Bion’s Adonis 35
. Introduction 35
. The path of song in Propertius 4.6 36
. Leading songs to Caesar 41
. Actium as monumental space 45
. Inauguratio and Augustus 49
. The path of Apollo 53
. Recall and refrain in Bion’s Lament for Adonis 57
. Measureless measures: the Adonis-cry and refrain 58
. Sensing Adonis, (ad)dressing Aphrodite 64
. Bion bucolicus and resonant space 71
. Conclusion 74
Occasion and Presence in Horace, Odes I 76
. Introduction 76
. c. 1.20: The merry echo 78
. Seeing Soracte: c. 1.9 85
. The Soracte ode as dramatic monologue 91
. Setting limits 94
. The power of now 99
. Situation and response 104
. c. 1.12: Following Orpheus 108
VIII Contents
Occasioning the Choral in Horace, Odes IV 125
. Introduction 125
. Fantasising the choral 129
. Choral presence and the future tense 134
. Rhythm and repetition: c. 4.1 142
. c. 4.5: Return and recognition 162
. c. 4.2: Imitation and identification 168
. The name of Icarus 175
Conclusion 187
Bibliography 193
Index Rerum et Nominum 203
Index Locorum 205
Introduction
One of Catullus’ best-known poems (Carmen 4) begins like this:
Phaselus ille, quem uidetis, hospites,
ait fuisse nauium celerrimus…
That boat which you are looking at, strangers, says that it was once the fastest of ships…
Three elements leap out at the reader at once: there is a boat endowed with the
power of speech, a group of ‘strangers’ (or ‘guests’) who are viewing the boat, and
someone who addresses the strangers, delivering the ‘speech’ of the boat through
indirect discourse. The rest of the poem comprises an account of the boat’s ‘biog-
raphy’, from its origin as a tree through its many nautical adventures and up to
its final resting place, the shore of the ‘limpid lake’ (limpidum lacum, 24) at which
the strangers now find it moored.
The point in space occupied by the docked vessel has a special status in this
poem: it is not only the place where the boat happens to be, but a shared space
in which the strangers’ act of viewing, the boat’s act of ‘speaking’ (whatever we
take this to mean), and the address to the strangers converge. The narrative
which emerges out of the reported speech of the boat employs this shared space
as both starting point and endpoint, concluding as it does with the account that
the boat made its way here to the lake-shore at the end of its long travels to dedi-
cate itself to Castor and Pollux (22–27). The physical presence of the boat in the
here and now of its moorage is thus both the initial prompt which gives rise to the
narrative and the setting of its final act.
Catullus conjures up this presence through deixis, one of the most basic and
most powerful tools of language.1 The deictic pronoun ille (‘that’, 1) works like a
pointed finger gesturing linguistically towards the boat, a gesture which implies
a shared field of vision between speaker and addressee. Deixis returns to centre
the field of vision towards the end of the poem with the pronoun hunc (‘this’, 24),
which informs us that the lake where the boat made its final stop is the same one
which the strangers see now in front of them. This final hunc marks the point at
which the narrated past of the boat’s youthful adventures comes full circle to
1 The best general introduction to deixis is Levinson 1983: 54–96. For the cognitive-linguistic
‘deictic shift theory’, see Galbraith 1995 and Stockwell 2002: 41–57. See also the essays collected
in the special 2004 edition of Arethusa (37.3), titled ‘The poetics of deixis in Alcman, Pindar, and
other lyric’.
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X Introduction
meet the lived present of the strangers’ viewing of it on the lake-shore. This sec-
ond deictic signal thus bespeaks not only a shared visual field but the shared
knowledge of the boat’s history which our storyteller imparts to the strangers in
a gesture of hospitality.
Up to a certain point, it is unproblematic to claim that the experience of the
strangers named in the first line of this poem resembles our experience as its read-
ers. We begin the poem ignorant of the boat’s past journeys, and we learn about
them at the same time and in the same way as the strangers do. But while we
share in their journey from ignorance to knowledge, it is less easy to claim that
we share in the field of vision which they purportedly share with the storyteller.
The strangers are given an opportunity which is not extended to us, the oppor-
tunity to refer the story they have just heard back to a physical presence which
lies before them. Feeney remarks that ‘the mimetically vivid invitation to “see”
the boat which is being pointed out simultaneously reminds readers that we can-
not see it even as it teases us to imagine that we can.’2 Following on this sugges-
tion, we could say that behind this overt invitation to ‘see’ the boat lies a tacit
invitation, issued directly to the reader, to produce a substitute for the boat’s
missing presence.3
One way to produce substitute presences is through narrative. Current theo-
ries of narrative advance the view that readers understand narratives, whether
factual or fictional, by situating themselves imaginatively within the world of the
story.4 This account privileges the role of the body and embodied cognition in the
experience of narrative worlds. In order to make sense of a story, this account
holds, we have to be there with the characters, navigating their environment and
inhabiting their world as if it were our own, using many of the same cognitive
tools we use when undergoing similar experiences in the real world.
Readers of Catullus’ poem find such an opportunity in the reported story of
the boat. Its anthropomorphic characterisation permits us to understand the his-
tory of this object in accordance with the patterns of human experience. Rather
than being built by human hands to be the instrument of human endeavours, this
boat was born and went on adventures of its own, with each of its destinations
representing a milestone in an ongoing life story. Making the boat relatable in
this way grants it a kind of presence to the reader which could be said to compen-
sate for the absence of the bodily nearness enjoyed by the hospites. Before being
brought to life as a humanlike figure, the boat is just a ‘that’ (ille) whose very
2 Feeney 2012: 31–32.
3 Davis 2002: 118 discusses how the reader is ‘included’ in the hospites’ act of viewing.
4 See e.g. Caracciolo 2011, Galbraith 1995, Fludernik 1996.
