Anna Chigas’s Reviews > Latin Literature: A History > Status Update
Anna Chigas
is on page 154 of 827
These poems produce an impression of immediacy, of a life reflected in them, that in the history of criticism has led to a persistence misunderstanding, that the poetry is artless and spontaneous and that the poet is a "child" who preely gives vent to his feelings, without the bonds of morality and the filters of culture.
— Oct 25, 2023 09:58AM
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Anna Chigas
is on page 307 of 827
Horace’s carpe diem should not be misunderstood as a banal invitation to pleasure; like Epicurus, the invitation to pleasure is not separate from the keen awareness that the pleasure itself is fleeing, as human life is fleeing. The only possibility is to erect, against the imminence of death or misfortune, the solid protection of possessions already enjoyed, happiness already experienced.
— Dec 11, 2023 06:51AM
Anna Chigas
is on page 130 of 827
Latin historical writing was in general developed by members of the ruling class, not by those of high political rank, who looked upon historical research as stylistic elaboration as so much time subtracted from real political action. Nonetheless, in the age of Sulla one witnesses the phenomenon of important politicians writing commentarii on themselves.
— Oct 24, 2023 07:05AM
Anna Chigas
is on page 117 of 827
The origins of Roman satire were mysterious even for the learned. The connection with Greek satyros is utterly false, even though it's ancient. It is certain that satura lanx indicated in early Rome a mixed dish of first offerings that was presented to the gods; and a form of judicial procedure called lex per saturam, when laws on different subjects were joined in a single legislative enactment.
— Oct 17, 2023 02:06AM
Anna Chigas
is on page 112 of 827
In a culture of contrast and ideological ferment, rich intellectual content alligned with an increasing taste for pathos in the Roman tragic genre: ghosts, dreams, prodigies, madness, deception, betrayals and cruelty; an appetite for the picturesque and the horrible. In this sense Pacuvius and Accius are the principal avant-garde exponents of a line of anti-classicism running through Roman literature.
— Oct 13, 2023 04:28AM
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Oct 25, 2023 10:03AM
Catullus's celebrated spontaneity is the cloak that this poetry wears, but it is an appearance deliberately sought and achieved through affluent learning. Even the poems that seem the most casual, an immediate reflection of reality, have their literary antecedents. The tie to a precise feeling secures for the Catullan poems a freshness that is utterly incomparable.
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The literary echoes are never purely ornamental but conceal an appearance of passionate outburst or playfulness, as if they were unmediated reflexes of an emotion and nothing more. Moreover, solid formal structures constitute the web on which is woven the entire free play of the poet.
The repeated offence of his lover's betrayal produces in him a painful split between sensuality and affection. The famous instance of this inner conflict is poem 72, which analyzes with lucid bitterness the disappearance of any esteem or affection for that woman who still, even more intensely, inflames him passion: iniura talis, cogit amare magis, sed bene velle minus- such an injury forces him to love more but respect less.
Especially well known is poem 85, which condenses into an oxymoron the painful sensation of the poet astonished at the split feelings that lacerate him: odi et amo, quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio sed fieri et excrucior- I love and I hate, you ask perhaps why I do. I don't know, but I feel it happening and I'm tormented. The ever frustrated hope for a love that is faithfully repaid accompanies Catullus's awareness that he never failed to keep the foedus of love; the arrogant certainly of his own blamelessness.
The poems establish relations that bear the theme of fides, the cardinal virtue in the Catullan ethical world- that fides of which the gods themselves were guarantors of in the distant heroic era and which in the corrupt present is violated and despised along with the other religious and moral values. The myth becomes the symbolic projection of the poet's aspirations, of his perpetually unsatisfied need to fasten so precarious a love with a firm grip.
His feelings for Lesbia began essentially as adultery; as free love based on eros. By becoming the exclusive object of the poet's moral commitment, the relationship paradoxically became like a powerul matrimonial bond in Catullus's hopes: the theme of conjugal fidelity recurs insistently.
