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Greek and Latin Expressions of Meaning

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Andreas T. Zanker

Chapter 7: The Metonymy of author for text

Texte intégral

harum omnium denominationum magis in praecipiendo diuisio quam in quaerendo difficilis inuentio est, ideo quod plena consuetudo est non modo poetarum et oratorum, sed etiam cottidiani sermonis huiusmodi denominationum.

“It is more difficult to distinguish all these metonymies in teaching them than to find them when you are looking for them, since the use of metonymies of this nature is abundant not only among poets and orators but also in daily speech” (Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.43).

1In Chapters 2 and 3 we looked at the Greek and Latin vocabulary of meaning and established that it falls into a limited number of categories. We also noted that many of these expressions of meaning seem to be derived from the vocabulary of human desire, thought, and sign-giving. On the basis of this, I argued in Chapters 4 and 5 that the polysemy of many of these expressions involves a metaphorical transference to inanimate objects: expressions that had been used of human beings came to be applied to things, and, at some crucial point, to texts themselves. This pattern, however, does not pertain in all cases: we have noted that the expressions “δύνασθαι”, “εἶναι”, “ualere”, “posse”, and “esse” represent a special category, since they do not issue from the sphere of human mental activity. Here, the extension appears to have occurred by a different mode, but the case for metaphorical transference remains robust. The question I would like to pose now is whether this type of transference is reflected in any other items of vocabulary relating to writing and interpretation. Can we posit a similar pattern for expressions of reading, for example? And, if so, did ancient authors exploit any of the figurative possibilities of these expressions?

I. Metaphor and Expressions of Reading

  • 1 Chantraine (1950), 115: “La lecture est à la fois une technique difficile et un privilège qui n’app (...)
  • 2 Svenbro (1999), 38. Not all of these have the same nuance, of course: “ἀναγιγνώσκειν” and “ἀνελίσσε (...)
  • 3 LSJ s.v. “ἀναγιγνώσκω” I. 1. The sense presumably emerged from the idea of “to know again”. Cf. Ste (...)
  • 4 In this excerpt one can also note the verb “γράφειν”, which originally meant “to carve”, being used (...)

2The case that the Greek and Roman vocabulary of reading arose via metaphor is in fact stronger than that for expressions of meaning, in part because the relevant usage postulates the presence of writing and its history can therefore be reconstructed more clearly on the basis of our extant texts.1 Svenbro, building on an article by Chantraine from 1950, notes that there are no fewer than twelve words attested in ancient Greek signifying “to read” that begin to appear in the written record from about the early fifth century BC (although some of these are formed from the same base).2 The earliest attested verb of reading in Greek was to become the dominant expression: (a) “ἀναγιγνώσκειν”. This had the prior meanings “know well”, “know certainly” and “perceive”, “recognize” in the Homeric epics,3 but it could also be used of the recognition of signs (“σήµατ᾽ἀναγνούσῃ”, “recognizing a sign” Homer, Odyssey 19.250; 23.206; cf. 24.346) – a sense that was probably crucial to the later development of the verb. Its employment in the sense of “to read” is first attested in a poem of Pindar celebrating the boxing victory of Hagesidamus in 476 BC (also an early instance of the “tablets of the mind” motif):4

1. τὸν Ὀλυµπιονίκαν ἀνάγνωτέ µοι
Ἀρχεστράτου παῖδα, πόθι φρενός
µᾶς γέγραπται.

  • 5 Cf. Sophocles, Philoctetes 1325. On the widespread metaphor of the “mind’s tablet”, reminiscent of (...)

“Read for me [the name of] the Olympic victor, the son of Archestratus, where it is written in my mind” (Pindar, Olympians 10.1-3).5

  • 6 LSJ s.v. “ἐπιλέγω” III: “Med. think upon, think over... 2. in Hdt. also, con over, read”.
  • 7 LSJ s.v. “ἐντυγχάνω” III: “Of books, meet with... hence, read”.
  • 8 LSJ s.v. “ἀναλέγω” III: “in Med., read through”.
  • 9 LSJ s.v. “ἀνελίσσω”: “unroll a book... read, interpret it”.

3Besides “ἀναγιγνώσκειν”, we might cite a number of other verbs that were likewise re-tasked in order to deal with the new technology: (b) “ἐπιλέγεσθαι” is attested in the sense of “to read” in Herodotus, where it also had the sense of “to think upon”, “to think over”;6 (c) “ἐντυγχάνειν” has a root meaning of “to happen upon”, but we see it used of “coming upon a book” in Plato, and Plutarch and Lucian used it of the act of reading itself;7 (d) “συγγίγνεσθαι” (“to spend time with”) appears to be somewhat similar to this; (e) “ἀναλέγεσθαι”, like “ἐπιλέγεσθαι”, contains a verb of “recitation”, and is attested as “to read through” from Callimachus’ Epigrams onwards.8 After the scroll became a mainstream writing medium, the verb (f) “ἀνελίσσειν” (“to unroll”) could also take on the transferred sense of “to read”.9 The upshot is clear: these expressions of reading were all derived from earlier vocabulary and used in a transferred sense of the new action.

  • 10 OLD s.v. “uoluo” 9: “To unroll (a scroll), ‘turn over’ (a book, etc.)”; cf. OLD s.v. “euoluo” 6: “t (...)
  • 11 OLD s.v. “peruoluto”: “To roll over and over, unwinding (a scroll) to the end”; cf. “peruoluo”.
  • 12 OLD s.v. “inuenio” 4b: “to find (in a document, book, etc.)”.
  • 13 OLD s.v. “lego” 8a.
  • 14 See, however, DELL s.v. “lego” 4: “Toutefois, ici l’évolution du sens n’est pas claire”; Chantraine (...)

4The Latin language contains analogous verbs of reading; if we set aside verbs such as “recitare” (“to read out”, “to recite”), “cognoscere” (“to get to know”), “uoluere” (“to unroll”),10peruolutare” (“to roll through”),11 and “inuenire” (“to come across”),12 we may concentrate on the principal verb “legere” and its variations (“perlegere”, “lectitare”, etc.).13 The word “legere” is attested relatively early on in the sense of “to read”, as we might expect given the fact that writing had been available in Italy since the Archaic age. In terms of this usage of the verb, modern authorities tend (with a certain trepidation) to follow the explanation of the grammarian Varro, who surmised that “legere” took on the meaning of “to read” as an expansion of the basic sense of “to collect”, “gather”: reading consists of “collecting” letters with one’s eyes (Varro, De Lingua Latina 6.66).14 If this is accurate, we see a similar transference in the case of the principal Latin verb of reading to what we have noted in Greek: in order to cope with the new technology, an older verb was adapted. Just as in the cases of the expressions of meaning surveyed in Chapters 2 and 3, and analyzed in Chapters 4 and 5, a polysemy leads back to a metaphorical transference.

II. The Metonymy of AUTHOR for TEXT

  • 15 Chris van den Berg points out to me the Roman habit of employing a different metonymy, whereby the (...)

5So far, the tacit argument in this chapter has been that the development of the ancient verbs of reading provides a further analogue for the view that expressions of meaning were transferred to written texts in the sense of “to mean”: the polysemy that eventuated in the case of the Greek and Latin vocabulary of reading, where one encounters both original and transferred usages, would seem to be suggestive when it comes to the polysemy of the ancient terminology of meaning. It would be interesting, however, to consider whether verbs of reading contribute something unique to the identification of books with human beings reflected in the metaphor surveyed in the previous chapter. Here we shall consider a different type of transference – metonymy – and show how it was possible to equate a text, or a group of texts, with its author.15 At the close of this chapter it will be clear that the identification of texts with human beings could occur by means of two different tropes – the basic metaphor, represented both on the level of language and on that of imagery, is reinforced by an ancillary metonymy, whereby one can read an author as well as his or her text.

  • 16 See Jakobson (1971), Lakoff & Johnson (1980), Lakoff (1987), Gibbs (1994), Kövecses (2002), Allan ( (...)
  • 17 See, for example, Jakobson (1971).
  • 18 Gibbs (1994), 322.

6The relationship between metaphor and metonymy has been debated since antiquity.16 According to one influential modern view, metonymy can be distinguished from metaphor in that metaphor depends on similarity while metonymy rests on contiguity; or, to put it another way, the former can be viewed as substitution, the latter as connection.17 Raymond Gibbs has suggested a rough test for determining whether a figurative expression belongs to the one category or the other: if one can rephrase a statement by using the copula “is like...” (thus turning the phrase into a simile), then one is probably dealing with a metaphor.18 A metonymy, which deals with a contiguous link rather than one of resemblance, does not generally pass this test. Thus:

2. “Achilles is a lion” > “Achilles is like a lion” = Metaphor.

3. “America’s financial industry is Wall Street” > “America’s financial industry is not like Wall Street” = Metonymy.

  • 19 See the useful index at the end of Panther & Radden (1999).
  • 20 Cf. LSJ s.v. “χάρτης” (“papyrus, or roll made therefrom”), which yielded the Latin noun “charta”; c (...)

7There are a number of different types of metonymy,19 one of the most common involving the substitution of a place for an industry; an example to set next to the one above (3) consists in “Hollywood” for the American film industry. According to most modern commentators, there exist major subsidiary forms, such as synecdoche (part for whole: “sail” for “boat”) and antonomasia (epithet for name: “Iron Lady” for “Margaret Thatcher”). Just like metaphor, metonymy is a force in language growth and change: new cultural items may receive a name via a relationship of contiguity rather than similarity to a pre-existing item, as we saw in the case of “bank” in Chapter 4. To present two ancient examples, the term “ βύβλος”/“τὸ βιβλίον” (“book”) is derived by metonymy from the name of the material on which one wrote – “ βύβλος” (“papyrus”) – and the Latin word “liber” (“tree bark”) appears to show a similar provenance.20

  • 21 Kövecses (2002), 144; Geeraerts (2010), 33.
  • 22 Fauconnier (1994), 5, has noted how the metonymy can behave in unpredictable ways when it comes to (...)

8One particular metonymy important to our topic is that in which an author’s writings are referred to by the name of the author. This metonymy, author for text, is a species of the broader metonymy according to which the producer stands for the product.21 It is well attested in the modern world: when reading a text, we may either say that we are reading the book (by referring to its title) or use the author’s name to stand in for it. For instance, we can either say that we are spending time with Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or that we are spending time with Gibbon; in the latter case, nobody will infer that we are sitting in the library with an eighteenth-century English historian. There are clear motivations for using this particular metonymy – for example, (a) when one wants to leave the actual title of the work unsaid, (b) when one wishes to state that one is reading from the entire corpus of the author, or (c) simply because it takes a shorter time to name the author than the relevant texts. Besides its function as a brachylogy, the trope also (d) establishes a sense of intimacy with the author being talked about, and suggests that the individual employing the metonymy has a command over all of the author’s writings. It appears to be relatively widespread, and is also attested with verbs of reading in other European languages such as the French (“lire”) and German (“lesen”).22

9The metonymy was available in Greek from at least Plato onwards; in his Phaedrus, for example, Plato has Socrates note that Phaedrus is carrying a speech by Lysias under his cloak; Socrates then metonymically refers to the speech by means of the name of its author:

4.... παρόντος δὲ καὶ Λυσίου, µαυτόν σοι µµελετᾶν παρέχειν οὐ πάνυ δέδοκται. ἀλλ᾽ἴθι, δείκνυε.

“... but since Lysias is here as well, it is definitely not my intention to furnish myself for you to practice on. But come on – show it!” (Plato, Phaedrus 228d-e).

  • 23 Yunis (2011), 91. My thanks to Craig Russell for pointing this out to me.
  • 24 Cf. “εἶθ᾽ ὥσπερ µεῖς τὸν ὠνούµενον βιβλία ΠλάτωνοςὠνεῖσθαίφαµενΠλάτωνακαὶΜένανδρον ὑποκρ (...)

10Lysias is not in fact present, but his speech (“λόγος”) is; as Yunis notes, the use of the trope is ironic, in that Plato will proceed to emphasize that Lysias is not in fact present when his speech is read.23 Later on, Plutarch makes explicit mention of the use of the metonymy in Greek in his Isis and Osiris,24 and the combination of the metonymy with a verb of reading can be found with the verb “ἀναγιγνώσκειν”:

5. οὗτος... ἤδη καὶ δι᾽ αὑτοῦ δύναται Χρύσιππον ἀναγιγνώσκειν.

“This man... is now able to read Chrysippus by himself” (Epictetus, Discourses 1.4.9).

  • 25 Two examples: “… ἀναγιγνώσκοντί µοι τὴν Ἀνδροµέδαν πρὸς µαυτόν” (“… when I was reading the Androme (...)

11In classical Greek, however, one generally read books rather than authors.25 The metonymy is especially prominent in Latin, however; consider the following examples:

6. liber tuus et lectus est et legitur a me diligenter...

Your book has been read, and is being read, diligently by me” (Cicero, Ad Familiares 6.5.1).

7. Catonem uero quis nostrorum oratorum, qui quidem nunc sunt, legit?

  • 26 Cf. OLD s.v. “lego” 8b.

“Which of our orators around today reads Cato?” (Cicero, Brutus 65).26

12In the first excerpt (6), we see the separation of the author from his book – it is the book written by Cicero’s addressee that has been read. In the second example (7) we can see the verb “legere” taking the name of an author as its object, but what Cicero means is that contemporary orators are not accustomed to reading Cato’s writing (= “libros Catonis uero quis nostrorum oratorum... legit?”). In his De Finibus, Cicero in fact demonstrates how conventional the metonymy was in Latin by employing the two usages of “legere” in quick succession:

8. a quibus tantum dissentio, ut... tamen male conuersam Atilii mihi legendam putem, de quo Licinius: “ferreum scriptorem”, uerum, opinor, scriptorem tamen, ut legendus sit.

  • 27 Shackleton Bailey in fact has the quotation run on to “legendus sit”, but the point is at any rate (...)

“I disagree with these people so strongly that... I judge the poorly translated [Electra] of Atilius is to be read, concerning whom Licinius used the phrase ‘an iron writer’, but still, I believe, a writer nevertheless and therefore deserving to be read” (Cicero, De Finibus 1.5).27

13Here, the name “Atilius” refers not solely to the individual who bears that name, but also to the corpus of his literary endeavors. In the one case, Cicero is discussing the reading of a particular text, while in the other he is asserting that the works of the author as a whole are to be read (= “ut sui libri legendi sint”). Nor is this simply a feature of the verb “legere”; Cicero uses the metonymy with other verbs of reading as well:

9. in poetis euoluendis.

  • 28 Cf. “quid poetarum euolutio... uoluptatis affert?” (“what pleasure does the reading through of the (...)

“In unrolling the poets” (Cicero, De Finibus 1.72).28

10. lectitauisse Platonem studiose... dicitur.

“He is said to have read Plato carefully” (Cicero, Brutus 121).

11. scriptores et legendi et peruolutandi.

Writers are to be read and perused” (Cicero, De Oratore 1.158).

  • 29 My thanks to Curtis Dozier for this reference.

14Roman rhetoricians were aware of this metonymy, Quintilian commenting on it in the eighth book of his Institutio Oratoria;29 the educator has just covered the tropes of metaphor and synecdoche (here separated from metonymy) and has moved on to a discussion of how things can be described by reference to contiguous things (metonymy):

12. quo modo fiunt innumerabiles species. huius enim sunt generis, cum ab Hannibale “caesa apud Cannas sexaginta milia” dicimus, et carmina Vergilii “Vergilium”...

“Of this form there are a number of kinds. For example, we say ‘sixty thousand were slain at Cannae’ by Hannibal, and we say ‘Vergil’ when we mean Vergil’s poems...” (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 8.6.26).

15In this excerpt we see the metonymy of author for text (producer for product) juxtaposed with a different type of metonymy – that of controller (general) for controlled (army) – where one is to understand “the army under Hannibal’s leadership” by the term “Hannibal”. Just as “Hannibal” could stand in for Hannibal’s army, “Vergil” could stand in for the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid. In this case a motivation for using the metonymy is clear; Vergil wrote a number of texts, and therefore referring to them by means of his name was encouraged by considerations of economy.

16The metonymy could manifest itself in certain other relevant ways, notably in conjunction with the prepositions “παρά” (with dative) and “apud” (with accusative). These two prepositions could both be used in the sense of “at someone’s house or place”:

13. Φοῖνιξ δ᾽ αὖθι παρ᾽ µµι µένων κατακοιµηθήτω...

  • 30 LSJ s.v. “παρά” B. II. 2: “at one’s house or place, with one...”.

“But let Phoenix lie down at my place, staying here...” (Homer, Iliad 9.427).30

14. bene uale, apud Orcum te uidebo.

  • 31 OLD s.v. “apud” 4: “At the house or residence of, with (a person)...”.

“Farewell, I shall see you in the house of Orcus” (Plautus, Asinaria 606).31

17There was, however, a grammatical usage, in that these prepositions could also introduce the name of an author in the place of his works. Just as we might say in English “in Homer”, Greek and Roman critics could write the following:

15. τί δὲ δὴ τὸ παρ᾽ Αἰσχίνῃ λεγόµενον...

  • 32 LSJ s.v. “παρά” B. II. 4: “in quoting authors... in Ephorus, etc.”; cf. Dickey (2007), 117.

“What about that which is said in Aeschines...” (Dionysius Halicarnassus, The Arrangement of Words 9.24).32

16. quod apud Ennium dicat ille Pythius Apollo.

  • 33 OLD s.v. “apud” 6: “In the writings of, ‘in’ (a writer); in (a book)”.

“That which that Pythian Apollo says in Ennius” (Cicero, De Oratore 1.199).33

  • 34 See the index of Dickey (2007). Cf. “ἐν Ἰλιάδι” (“in the Iliad”, Herodotus, Histories 2.116.2).
  • 35 OLD s.v. “in” 25: “In (books, documents, writings, etc.), b. (a writer)”.

18We can see something very similar with regard to the Latin preposition “in” itself when it takes the ablative; while in Greek one generally read things in a book, whereby the term “ἐν” was used,34 in Latin one could read them in both books and authors:35

17. quod in Eunucho parasitus suaderet militi.

“What the parasite recommends to the soldier in the [Terence’s] Eunuch” (Cicero, Ad Familiares 1.9.19).

18. multae in eo claraeque sententiae...

“There are many sententiae in him [Seneca], splendid ones...” (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 10.1.129).

19In the second example (18), we can see how the text and the author could be equated for purposes of reference; once again, economy seems to be a plausible motivation, since in the case of Seneca it would take considerably longer to give the titles of the works than it would to give the author’s name. In fact, employing the trope is even more economical than a phrase such as “in libris suis”, “in his books”. By using the metonymy author for text, Quintilian can make a statement about Seneca’s style as a whole.

  • 36 On this example, see Leidl (2005), 13.

20The metonymy of author for text could also be used in conjunction with the metaphor of text = person in descriptions of literary style; this was a common feature in texts such as the Brutus:36

19. habet [Lysias] enim certos sui studiosos, qui non tam habitus corporis opimos quam gracilitates consectentur; quos, ualetudo modo bona sit, tenuitas ipsa delectat – quamquam in Lysia sunt saepe etiam lacerti, sic ut-fieri nihil possit ualentius; uerum est certe genere toto strigosior...

“For [Lysias] has his confirmed devotees, who strive after a lean rather than an exuberant form of body, and to whom the sparseness is it self pleasing, so long as it is healthy; and yet, while there are muscles in Lysias, of a particularly effective type of vigor, it is true that he belongs to the more meager type...” (Cicero, Brutus 64).

  • 37 On this, see Möller (2004).
  • 38 For a reading of the tropes in Seneca, Epistulae 46, see Wilson (2008), 62-67.

21First of all, the name “Lysias” is used metonymically to refer to Lysias’ writing as well as to Lysias himself; but Cicero also makes use of the metaphor we looked at in the previous chapter, whereby we read that there are “muscles” in the orator’s writing. Lysias’ works are further identified with the historical figure by means of the metaphorical terminology used of rhetorical style – leanness and exuberance of body are qualities of human beings just as much as of writing. The style is the man.37 Similar use of such metaphors and metonymies in conjunction can be found in other authors as well, for example in Seneca (Epistulae 46).38

III. Artistic Use of the Metonymy AUTHOR for TEXT

22In addition to these practical applications, where the motivation was principally economy, the conceptual extensions that the metonymy facilitated could also be exploited for artistic purposes in Latin literature. These applications could range from the ridiculous (where the author is described as an object for sale at the marketplace) to the sublime (where a form of immortality for the author is assured by the identification with his texts). We can see the former already in Catullus 14, where the poet accuses his friend Calvus of having sent him a collection of terrible poetry; Calvus will not get away with it:

20. nam si luxerit ad librariorum
curram scrinia Caesios Aquinos,
Suffenum omnia colligam uenena.

“For as soon as it is light I shall rush to the shelves of the booksellers; I shall collect Caesii, Aquini, Suffenus – all the poisons” (Catullus, Carmina 14.17-19).

  • 39 For another example, cf. “quorsum pertinuit stipare Platona Menandro, Eupolin Archilocho, comites e (...)

23Here the names do not in fact refer to the human authors with whom they are associated but rather to their poetry:39 the singular “Suffenum” refers to the corpus of poetry by a single bad author, while “Caesios” and “Aquinos” refer to the works by authors who are linked (by virtue of being bad poets) to Caesius and Aquinus. The metonymy is further complicated by the books’ equation with poison (“uenena”), which picks up on the lethal quality of the collection that Calvus had sent Catullus (mentioned in lines 13-15). Here we see a connection being drawn between (a) authors, (b) their works, and (c) poison: (a) and (b) are linked by metonymy, while (c) is identified with (b) by metaphor.

  • 40 On Crusius’ argument that a portrait of Martial may have faced the poem, see Citroni (1975), 15. Cf (...)

24When the author uses the metonymy to identify himself with his own intellectual products, the gulf between author and product can be completely annihilated. In the first poem of Martial’s collection of Epigrammata, for example, the poet refuses to confirm precisely who is speaking until the end of the second line:40

21. hic est quem legis ille, quem requiris,
toto notus in orbe
Martialis
argutis epigrammaton libellis.

“Here is the one whom you read, whom you ask for, the one known all over the world on account of his clever books of epigrams – Martial” (Martial, Epigrammata 1.1.1-3).

25The pronoun “ille” might have referred to a noun such as “liber” or “libellus”, but it turns out that it denotes the author of the book. The revelation that the “ille” corresponds with “Martialis” is arresting, since the dedicatory poem of the collection of Catullus, one of Martial’s chief influences, had referred explicitly to the book (“libellus”) of poetry in the very first line (“cui dono lepidum nouum libellum”, “to whom am I giving this charming new book...?” Catullus, Carmina 1.1). A similar conflation of author with literary work can be found in the very next poem in Martial’s collection, in which the poet tells the reader where to buy his books of epigrams: he refers to the books themselves in the first line as “meos… libellos” (“my books” Martial, Epigrammata 1.2.1), but subsequently refers to where he himself is to be bought – “ubi sim uenalis” (“where I am for sale” Martial, Epigrammata 1.2.5). To give a final example, the poet humorously returns to the theme in the book’s penultimate poem, where a friend notes that Martial (his poetry is meant) is not worth five denarii: “‘tanti non es’ ais? sapis, Luperce” (“‘you are not worth that much’ you say? You are wise, Lupercus” Martial, Epigrammata 1.117.18).

  • 41 Cf. “nemo me lacrimis decoret nec funera fletu faxit. cur? uolito uiuos per ora uirum” (“let nobody (...)
  • 42 For further Horatian applications of the metonymy, cf. Sermones 1.10.67-69 (on Lucilius): “sed ille (...)

26This form of the metonymy – in which the author refers to his poetry by his own name – had profound repercussions in Roman poetic culture from Ennius onwards,41 particularly when it came to authors’ pronouncements about future fame and survival. Horace, for example, at the close of his ode to Maecenas (Odes 1.1), mentions the possibility of being inserted among the canonical lyric poets by his patron:42

22. si me lyricis uatibus inseres
sublimi feriam sidera uertice.

“If you insert me among the lyric bards, I shall strike the stars with my lofty head” (Horace, Carmina 1.1.35-36).

  • 43 The view of Nisbet & Hubbard (1970), 15, that “inserere” translates the Greek “ἐγκρίνειν” (supposed (...)
  • 44 Feeney (1993), 41; Farrell (2007), 189-190. Cf. McElduff (2013), 139-141, with further bibliography

27Feeney and Farrell emphasize the physicality of the act associated with “inseres”;43 the idea is not simply that of canonization in the roster of the great lyric poets, but one has also to imagine the insertion of the rolls of Horace’s Carmina in the same scrinia or capsa as the poetry of Sappho, Alcaeus, and the other lyricists.44 In a sense, Horace himself is in there with them – the metonymy allows the poet to join the other lyric greats in their box, placed there by the hand of his patron. Horace makes use of a trope that was widely used in Latin discourse in order to say something about his poetic status; the image is contrasted with that found in the following line, where we see Horace banging his head against the stars.

28The tie between the fate of a book and the fate of its author became something of a fixture in Augustan poetry, and here the metonymy had a key role to play. At the other end of his collection, Horace makes an even more ambitious prediction:

23. dicar, qua uiolens obstrepit Aufidus
et qua pauper aquae Daunus agrestium
regnauit populorum, ex humili potens
princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos
deduxisse modos...

  • 45 Cf. Horace, Carmina 2.20.17-20: “me... noscent, me... discet”, although the imagery argues against (...)

“I shall be spoken of where the willful Aufidus thunders and where Daunus, poor in water, ruled over the rustic peoples; I, powerful from a humble origin, the first to have introduced Aeolic song to Italian measures...” (Horace, Carmina 3.30.6-10).45

  • 46 See OLD s.v. “dico” 6b: “to sing, recite (asong)”.
  • 47 His reading is endorsed by the passage’s being given as an example at OLD s.v. “dico” 2: “To say, d (...)

29Here, there is probably no particular metonymical force in the crucial word (“dicar”): although it is also possible to interpret it as “I shall be recited”,46 and it would be nice to find the metonymy being exploited in both the first and final poems of Horace’s first collection of Carmina, it is generally translated in the manner of Rudd’s Loeb edition, “I shall be spoken of”.47 Ovid, however, pushed things further: at the very close of his Metamorphoses, where he is following Horace closely, he famously set the following lines:

24. quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris,
ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama,
siquid habent ueri uatum praesagia, uiuam.

  • 48 Compare Bömer (1986), 490.

“Where Roman domination extends over the conquered countries, I shall be read by the mouth of the people, and I shall go on living in fame through all the centuries, if the prophecies of bards/prophets have any truth to them” (Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.877-879).48

  • 49 For an ironic take, see Lucan, Pharsalia 9.985-986: “uenturi me teque legent; Pharsalia nostra uiue (...)

30The form that Horace employed, “dicar” (“I shall be spoken of”), is relatively common; “legar” (“I shall be read”), however, is extremely rare and does not appear prior to Ovid’s Amores and the fourth book of Propertius. This rarity is unsurprising, given that it is a first-person passive future-tense form of a verb of reading, but it has clear implications for the type of immortality that the poet envisages for himself. All else is subject to the whims of Jupiter and the depredations of time but Ovid’s Metamorphoses will survive, the poet making use of the metonymy author for work in order to imply that he himself will become immortal by means of his writing. Ovid, or at least his better part (“parte tamen meliore mei Metamorphoses 15.875) will live on even after the body itself disintegrates, his name remaining unerasable (“indelibile Metamorphoses 15.876). The trope is the principal mechanism by which the poet becomes immortal – clearly, no actual consciousness or subjectivity will be left over post mortem – and it would continue to perform this function through the subsequent history of western literature.49

31This final pronouncement of Ovid’s magnum opus had several precedents in the poet’s works, however: earlier on in his career, Ovid had devoted an entire poem, the sphragis to his first book of Amores (1.15), to the idea that a poet becomes immortal through his poetry, and here the metonymy is similarly in force. The military and legal professions are compared unfavorably to the poetic art, in that these careers doom those who ply them to a short lifespan, whereas the writing of poetry confers immortality on the author:

  • 50 Cf. McKeown (1989), 393-394, with comparative material: “canar =mea carmina canantur”.

25.... mihi fama perennis
quaeritur, in toto semper ut orbe
canar.50

“... by me eternal fame is sought, that I might be sung throughout the world forever” (Ovid, Amores 1.15.7-8).

32The poet then gives precedents for this: Homer will live (“uiuet”, 9) as long as Tenedos stands and the Simois rolls its waters, and Hesiod will do the same while the grapes ripen. Callimachus will always be sung (“cantabitur”, 13), and Sophocles, Aratus, and Menander will be similarly long-lived by means of their poetry. In each of these cases the grammatical subject of the verb is the name of an author, and once again his immortality relies on the metonymy that identifies his name with his body of poetry.

33Ovid does not keep up the identification for the entirety of the poem, however: once it has been established that a form of immortality is in fact possible for poets, he varies the catalogue somewhat, relaxing the metonymy at line 23 by allowing the poet to stand in the genitive case relative to his poetic productions:

26. carmina sublimis tunc sunt peritura Lucreti,
exitio terras cum dabit una dies ;
Tityrus et segetes Aeneiaque arma legentur,
Roma triumphati dum caput orbis erit

The songs of sublime Lucretius will perish only when a single day will consign the countries to destruction; Tityrus, the crops, and the weapons of Aeneas will be read so long as Rome will be the capital of the world that has been triumphed over” (Ovid, Amores 1.15.23-26).

  • 51 On the text of line 38, see McKeown (1989), 418-419, who follows Kenney and Heinsius in printing “a (...)

34In contrast to the opening examples, these poets are not the subjects of their respective main verbs (in line 25 we see a different metonymy, subject matter for work, taking over). The weakening of the metonymy becomes most apparent in line 32, where we read that the poems themselves lack death (“carmina morte carent”) rather than their authors: here we see activation of the metaphor text = person. Nevertheless, in the poem’s final refrain the poet returns to the identification of poetry and poet: others might enjoy power and wealth (33-35), but all Ovid asks for is to be fed cups of water by Apollo, to be crowned with the poet’s laurel, and to be read :51

27.... atque ita sollicito multus amante legar!
pascitur in uiuis Liuor; post fata quiescit,
cum suus ex merito quemque tuetur honos.
ergo etiam cum me supremus adederit ignis,
uiuam, parsque mei multa superstes erit
.

“... and thus may I be read frequently by the worried lover! Envy feeds upon the living; it grows quiet post mortem, when each man’s nobility watches over him according to his deserts. Therefore even when the final fire will have gnawed at me I shall go on living, and a great part of me will survive” (Ovid, Amores 1.15.38-42).

35Thus, the metonymy effectively bookends Ovid’s history of literary immortalizations in Amores 1.15. Like Horace, the younger poet cannot resist playing with the paradox of the identification: it is only after death that poets come into inalienable possession of glory, and even after his cremation a great amount of Ovid will live on through the act of being read out by his readership. The poet repeats the refrain even in his exile poetry, where the reference to his funeral pyre strikes us as still more powerful than in his youthful works:

28.... me tamen extincto fama superstes erit,
dumque suis uictrix omnem de montibus orbem
prospiciet domitum Martia Roma,
legar.

“... even though I am dead my fame will be a survivor, and while victorious Rome, creation of Mars, will gaze from its hills over the entirety of the conquered world, I shall be read” (Ovid, Tristia 3.7.50-52).

IV.... disiecti membra poetae

  • 52 Compare Heine’s phrase from his play Almansor: “… Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch (...)

36The converse of these pronouncements also obtained, whereby the destruction or defacement of a text could be described as the death or laceration of the author.52 The end of the Epistle to Augustus presents a good example; here, Horace discusses how it is preferable for a powerful individual to avoid being sung of by an inferior poet, as it has evil consequences for both the poet and the individual being praised. He imagines himself in the position of the laudandus thus:

29.... nec praue factis decorari uersibus opto,
ne rubeam pingui donatus munere et una
cum
scriptore meo, capsa porrectus operta,
deferar in uicum uendentem tus et odores
et piper et quidquid chartis amicitur ineptis.

“... nor would I want to be praised in badly-made verses, lest I blush upon having been granted the crass gift, and, together with my author, I be stretched out in a covered book box and be taken down into the neighborhood where frankincense, perfumes, pepper, and whatever is wrapped in inept pages is sold” (Horace, Epistulae 2.1.266-270).

  • 53 Brink (1982), 263 points out that the scholiast’s equation “capsa” = “arca” (“coffin”) is unprecede (...)

37In this passage we have in fact two metonymies at work; both the author of the poem and its subject matter, Horace, are identified with the book that is consigned to its unworthy fate (author for work, subject matter for work). The scholiasts already argued for the metaphorical equation of the book box as “coffin”,53 which seems plausible especially after the participle “porrectus”, which could mean “laid out” in both a literal and figurative sense. The term “porrectus” is grammatically attached to Horace, in this case the subject matter of the work, but presumably also applies to the author himself – the anonymous scriptor.

38The metonymy of author for work can perhaps also go some way to wards explaining one of the callidissimae iuncturae of Latin literature – Horace’s phrase “disiecti membra poetae”. In Sermones 1.4, Horace argues that neither his own satiric writing nor the satires of his generic forerunner Lucilius can be classed as poetry: plain language (“puris uerbis”) and a sense of arrangement is not enough for real poetry, since, regardless of the artfulness of the poet’s word placement, elevated vocabulary is also required. He provides his own writing and that of Lucilius as evidence: if one took away the meter and rearranged the words, one would not “find the limbs even of a dismembered poet” in this lower genre:

30. his, ego quae nunc,
olim quae scripsit Lucilius, eripias si
tempora certa modosque, et quod prius ordine uerbum est
posterius facias, praeponens ultima primis,
non, ut si soluas “postquam Discordia taetra
belli ferratos postis portasque refregit”,
inuenias etiam disiecti membra poetae.

“If you were to tear away the fixed rhythms and meters from the verse that I myself write now and that Lucilius wrote long ago, and were to set later a word that is currently earlier in order, placing the final ones before the first ones, you would not find the limbs even of a dismembered poet, as you would if you broke down ‘After repulsive Discord broke back the metal posts and gates of war’” (Horace, Sermones 1.4.56-62).

  • 54 On this excerpt, see Freudenburg (1993), 145-150; Oberhelman & Armstrong (1995); Gowers (2012) 168- (...)
  • 55 Horace’s indebtedness to Aristotle, who vaunted the importance of proportion and synthesis, would s (...)
  • 56 Freudenburg (1993), 148-149.

39The lines quoted in this excerpt are by Ennius, the father of the Roman hexametrical tradition; his language, Horace suggests, is unmistakably poetic on account of its grand vocabulary, even if the words’ order is changed by metathesis (“switching around”).54 Freudenburg, in an influential discussion, argues that Horace is in fact being disingenuous here – the poet whose writing Nietzsche likened to a mosaic could not really be someone who held word arrangement in low esteem;55 moreover, Freudenburg notes, the artful arrangement of the final phrase “disiecti membra poetae”, an example of iconic word arrangement in its splitting of “disiecti” and “poetae”, appears to put the lie to the apparent meaning of the passage. These three words capitalize on the metaphorical usage of “membrum”/“κῶλον”, whose original meaning was “limb” but which came to be used in the grammatical sense of “clause”; they conjure up the poem-animal, described by Aristotle in his Poetics (1459a18-21) and encountered in the previous chapter. The very next word we might expect to be the genitive of “poem” (“poematis”), but instead we get the poet himself (“poetae”), and the “membra” turn out to be his limbs.56

  • 57 Kiessling & Heinze (1957), 78: “schwerlich ist an den terminologischen Gebrauch von membrum κῶλον i (...)
  • 58 Porphyrio recognizes this in his comment on Sermones 1.4.56-57 Holder: “Et est sensus: si dissoluas (...)
  • 59 As Denis Feeney has noted, there was certainly something of a tradition in Roman poetry of playing (...)

40Even after noting the obvious metaphor of “membra”, however, the phrase remains obscure: it is, after all, not the poet who is being torn apart, but rather his poetry. Moreover, one might expect the adjective “disiectus” to apply to the “membra” themselves.57 One clear possibility is that “disiecti” is in fact a transferred epithet (hypallage), and that we should read the phrase as being equivalent to “disiecta membra poetae” – “the torn-apart clauses of a poet”. The word “disiecta” would therefore clearly reflect the metathesis, or rearrangement, of words rather than of a human being. I would argue, however, that the metonymy of author for work had a role to play in this context;58 it is entirely plausible that the convention of referring to a work (“poema”) by means of the author (“poeta”) may have made the transference particularly attractive to Horace. Just as authors can be depicted (and depict themselves) as surviving through their poetry, so too could a writer stand in for his text when it came to its being metathesized – rearranged. On this reading, Sermones 1.4.62 represents a highly compressed example of the metaphor of text = person intersecting with the metonymy of author for text, a combination that we have already noted in the case of Cicero’s Brutus (see excerpt 19). In fact, we can see Ennius’ name itself torn apart in the word following the quotation: “inuenias etiam disiecti membra poetae”. The verb of discovery, “inuenire” (“to find”), itself a verb of reading, gestures to itself, where we find Ennius’ name in disarray.59

V. Conclusion

41In the case of verbs of reading, then, we find a different type of double-usage to set next to our expressions of meaning: while phrases such as “sibi uelle” could be used of texts as well as of people in a manner similar to the English verb “to mean”, verbs of reading can be shown to take both texts and authors as their direct objects in a number of western languages (including Latin). We have seen how the metonymy author for work was exploited by Roman poets: by using the first-person future passive form of a verb of reading, “legar”, Ovid could suggest that he himself was to become immortal through his writing. On the other hand, Horace could use the same metonymy in order to describe the metathesis of clauses in terms of the tearing apart of an author’s limbs. The main thing to note is that the trope further enables an elision of the distinction between human beings and texts; it should therefore be studied along side the metaphor of text = person that we considered in the previous chapter. That both tropes existed in the ancient world as well as in the modern one may blind us to their force; it is important for us to be aware of them and to constantly remind ourselves of their presence in both literature and language in general.

Notes

1 Chantraine (1950), 115: “La lecture est à la fois une technique difficile et un privilège qui n’appartient d’abord qu’aux savants et aux clercs. Dans chaque langue indo-européenne, il a fallu, pour dénommer cette technique, créer un vocabulaire nouveau...”.

2 Svenbro (1999), 38. Not all of these have the same nuance, of course: “ἀναγιγνώσκειν” and “ἀνελίσσειν” are hardly synonymous. My point is to show that this vocabulary is transferred, not that the relevant words mean precisely the same thing.

3 LSJ s.v. “ἀναγιγνώσκω” I. 1. The sense presumably emerged from the idea of “to know again”. Cf. Steiner (1994), 26-29.

4 In this excerpt one can also note the verb “γράφειν”, which originally meant “to carve”, being used of the act of writing.

5 Cf. Sophocles, Philoctetes 1325. On the widespread metaphor of the “mind’s tablet”, reminiscent of the modern computer metaphor for memory and cognition, see Pfeiffer (1968), 17.

6 LSJ s.v. “ἐπιλέγω” III: “Med. think upon, think over... 2. in Hdt. also, con over, read”.

7 LSJ s.v. “ἐντυγχάνω” III: “Of books, meet with... hence, read”.

8 LSJ s.v. “ἀναλέγω” III: “in Med., read through”.

9 LSJ s.v. “ἀνελίσσω”: “unroll a book... read, interpret it”.

10 OLD s.v. “uoluo” 9: “To unroll (a scroll), ‘turn over’ (a book, etc.)”; cf. OLD s.v. “euoluo” 6: “to unroll (a papyrus roll); to read through (a book or author)”.

11 OLD s.v. “peruoluto”: “To roll over and over, unwinding (a scroll) to the end”; cf. “peruoluo”.

12 OLD s.v. “inuenio” 4b: “to find (in a document, book, etc.)”.

13 OLD s.v. “lego” 8a.

14 See, however, DELL s.v. “lego” 4: “Toutefois, ici l’évolution du sens n’est pas claire”; Chantraine puts forward the possibility that we may be dealing with entirely different verbs.

15 Chris van den Berg points out to me the Roman habit of employing a different metonymy, whereby the main character of poem stands in for the actual title; see the proem to Statius, Achilleid, particularly 1.19, where the poet claims that he is soon to sing of Domitian: “... magnusque tibi praeludit Achilles” (“... and great Achilles plays for you the prelude”); compare the use of “Achilles” at Statius, Siluae 4.4.94 and 4.7.23-24. Tacitus does the same thing in his Dialogus, where Maternus states: “quod si qua omisit Cato, sequenti recitatione Thyestes dicet” (“anything Cato omits, Thyestes will say in my next recitation” Tacitus, Dialogus 3); cf. Augustus’ aborted Ajax:“... quaerentibusque amicis, quidnam Aiax ageret, respondit Aiacem suum in spongiam incubuisse” (“... when his friends asked as to what was happening with the Ajax, he responded that his Ajax had fallen on his sponge” Suetonius, Augustus 85.2); Martial, Apophoreta 184. The conceit had Augustan precursors: compare Propertius, Elegiae 2.24a. 1-2.

16 See Jakobson (1971), Lakoff & Johnson (1980), Lakoff (1987), Gibbs (1994), Kövecses (2002), Allan (2008), 10-13, Geeraerts (2010), 1-45.

17 See, for example, Jakobson (1971).

18 Gibbs (1994), 322.

19 See the useful index at the end of Panther & Radden (1999).

20 Cf. LSJ s.v. “χάρτης” (“papyrus, or roll made therefrom”), which yielded the Latin noun “charta”; compare Anglo-Saxon “bōc” (“beech tree”, “book”). The Greek word for papyrus (“ βύβλος”) may in fact have originated in a further metonymy: the Phoenician city Byblos apparently exported the material; see Frisk s.v. “βίβλος” (affirmative) and Beekes s.v. “βύβλος” (more skeptical). If this is to be trusted, the series of metonymies would be twofold: place of origin > material > object (τὸ βιβλίον). Other ways of creating vocabulary are attested: the early Greek term for “tablet”, “δέλτος”, was a loan word from the Near East whose ancestor meant “door”. There are words whose derivation puzzled the ancient grammarians, such as the Latin noun “pagina” (“page”): cf. Festus 221 Lindsay; DELL s.v. “pagina”.

21 Kövecses (2002), 144; Geeraerts (2010), 33.

22 Fauconnier (1994), 5, has noted how the metonymy can behave in unpredictable ways when it comes to anaphora (referring back): “Plato is on the top shelf. It is bound in leather. You’ll find that he is a very interesting author”.

23 Yunis (2011), 91. My thanks to Craig Russell for pointing this out to me.

24 Cf. “εἶθ᾽ ὥσπερ µεῖς τὸν ὠνούµενον βιβλία ΠλάτωνοςὠνεῖσθαίφαµενΠλάτωνακαὶΜένανδρον ὑποκρίνεσθαιτὸν τὰ Μενάνδρου ποιήµαθ᾽ διατιθέµενον” (“just as we say that one in the act of buying the books of Plato is ‘buying Plato’, and we say that one representing the poems of Menander is ‘acting Menander’” Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 379a), cited by Porter (1992), 79 n. 29.

25 Two examples: “… ἀναγιγνώσκοντί µοι τὴν Ἀνδροµέδαν πρὸς µαυτόν” (“… when I was reading the Andromeda to myself…” Aristophanes, Frogs 52-53); “ἴθι δή µοι ἀνάγνωθι τὴν τοῦ Λυσίου λόγου ἀρχήν” (“Come then and read to me the opening of the speech of Lysias” Plato, Phaedrus 262d).

26 Cf. OLD s.v. “lego” 8b.

27 Shackleton Bailey in fact has the quotation run on to “legendus sit”, but the point is at any rate clear.

28 Cf. “quid poetarum euolutio... uoluptatis affert?” (“what pleasure does the reading through of the poets offer?” Cicero, De Finibus 1.25).

29 My thanks to Curtis Dozier for this reference.

30 LSJ s.v. “παρά” B. II. 2: “at one’s house or place, with one...”.

31 OLD s.v. “apud” 4: “At the house or residence of, with (a person)...”.

32 LSJ s.v. “παρά” B. II. 4: “in quoting authors... in Ephorus, etc.”; cf. Dickey (2007), 117.

33 OLD s.v. “apud” 6: “In the writings of, ‘in’ (a writer); in (a book)”.

34 See the index of Dickey (2007). Cf. “ἐν Ἰλιάδι” (“in the Iliad”, Herodotus, Histories 2.116.2).

35 OLD s.v. “in” 25: “In (books, documents, writings, etc.), b. (a writer)”.

36 On this example, see Leidl (2005), 13.

37 On this, see Möller (2004).

38 For a reading of the tropes in Seneca, Epistulae 46, see Wilson (2008), 62-67.

39 For another example, cf. “quorsum pertinuit stipare Platona Menandro, Eupolin Archilocho, comites educere tantos?” (“what was the use of packing Plato in with Menander, Eupolis with Archilochus, of taking along such serious friends?” Horace, Sermones 2.3.11-12).

40 On Crusius’ argument that a portrait of Martial may have faced the poem, see Citroni (1975), 15. Cf. Martial, Epigrammata 3.95.7-8 (“legor”); Epigrammata 8.3.7 (“me tamen ora legent”). On this aspect of Martial, see Roman (2001). For other uses of the metonymy in Martial, compare the epigrams on copies of Cicero, Livy, Sallust, and Lucan in the Apophoreta (Martial, Apophoreta 186, 188, 190, 191, 194), for example that on Lucan: “sunt quidem qui me dicant non esse poetam: sed qui me uendit bybliopola putat” (“some say that I am not a real poet; but the bookseller who sells me says I am” Martial, Apophoreta 194).

41 Cf. “nemo me lacrimis decoret nec funera fletu faxit. cur? uolito uiuos per ora uirum” (“let nobody decorate me with tears, nor make a funeral with lamentation. Why? I fly, still alive, through the mouths of men” Ennius, Epigrammata fr. 46 Courtney); this is reworked by Vergil, Georgics 3.8-9.

42 For further Horatian applications of the metonymy, cf. Sermones 1.10.67-69 (on Lucilius): “sed ille, si foret hoc nostrum fato delapsus in aeuum, detereret sibi multa” (“but he, if he were to slide down by fate into our own age, would smooth away much from himself/his work”); Epistulae 1.19.33-34 (on himself): “iuuat immemorata ferentem ingenuis oculisque legi manibusque teneri” (“it pleases me, in bringing forth what is new, to be read by the eyes and held by the hands of the noble”).

43 The view of Nisbet & Hubbard (1970), 15, that “inserere” translates the Greek “ἐγκρίνειν” (supposedly, “include in a canon”) has come under fire in recent years. For a depersonalized “inseres” (“if you set me among (i.e. if I become one of) the lyric poets”), see Kovacs (2010). For the sense of “inserere” as reflecting “µπλέκειν” rather than “ἐγκρίνειν”, see Leigh (2010).

44 Feeney (1993), 41; Farrell (2007), 189-190. Cf. McElduff (2013), 139-141, with further bibliography.

45 Cf. Horace, Carmina 2.20.17-20: “me... noscent, me... discet”, although the imagery argues against this particular metonymy.

46 See OLD s.v. “dico” 6b: “to sing, recite (asong)”.

47 His reading is endorsed by the passage’s being given as an example at OLD s.v. “dico” 2: “To say, declare, state”.

48 Compare Bömer (1986), 490.

49 For an ironic take, see Lucan, Pharsalia 9.985-986: “uenturi me teque legent; Pharsalia nostra uiuet, et a nullo tenebris damnabimur aeuo” (“our descendants will read me and you [Caesar]; our Pharsalia will live and we shall be doomed to shadow in no age”).

50 Cf. McKeown (1989), 393-394, with comparative material: “canar =mea carmina canantur”.

51 On the text of line 38, see McKeown (1989), 418-419, who follows Kenney and Heinsius in printing “atque a sollicito multus amante legar”.

52 Compare Heine’s phrase from his play Almansor: “… Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen” (“where one burns books, one also ends up burning people”).

53 Brink (1982), 263 points out that the scholiast’s equation “capsa” = “arca” (“coffin”) is unprecedented in Latin. Rudd (1989), 122: “It may be that capsa is not elsewhere equated with arca or feretrum; but such an equation is surely the point of the present witticism”.

54 On this excerpt, see Freudenburg (1993), 145-150; Oberhelman & Armstrong (1995); Gowers (2012) 168-169. My thanks to Kathrin Winter for discussion of this passage.

55 Horace’s indebtedness to Aristotle, who vaunted the importance of proportion and synthesis, would seem to argue further against it.

56 Freudenburg (1993), 148-149.

57 Kiessling & Heinze (1957), 78: “schwerlich ist an den terminologischen Gebrauch von membrum κῶλον in Metrik und Rhetorik für die ‘Glieder’ des Verses bzw. Systems oder der Periode gedacht – dann müsste von disiecta membra gesprochen sein –, sondern an Stelle des auseinandergerissenen poema setzt H. in Erinnerung an die Sagen von Orpheus und Linus kühn den disiectus poeta: durch das ennianische Beispiel hoher Poesie gleichsam mit fortgerissen, zeigt H., dass er sehr wohl selbst auch anders als puris uerbis schreiben könnte”. Cf. “disiecta genitor membra laceri corporis in ordinem dispone” (“father, put in order the scattered limbs of this torn apart body” Seneca, Phaedra 1256-1257).

58 Porphyrio recognizes this in his comment on Sermones 1.4.56-57 Holder: “Et est sensus: si dissoluas uersus uel meos uel Lucilii, non eadem uerba inuenies, quae sunt <in> Ennianis uersibus, qui magno scilicet spiritu et uerbis altioribus compositi sunt...” (“this is the meaning: if you were to undo either my verses or those of Lucilius, you will not find the same words as are in the Ennian verses, since they were clearly composed with great spirit and with more elevated language”); compare Pseudo-Acro on Sermones 1.4.56 Keller.

59 As Denis Feeney has noted, there was certainly something of a tradition in Roman poetry of playing on Ennius’ name in words such as “perennis” and “perennius”; given the placement of the near-anagram immediately after the citation, and given contemporary Epicurean views concerning the analogy between writing and reality, it is a clear possibility that the mixing-up of the name is here intentional; see Armstrong (1995). For an echo of this passage, see Ausonius, Epistulae 11.29 (of an editor of Homer, probably Zenodotus): “quique sacri lacerum collegit corpus Homeri” (“he gathered together the torn-up body of Homer”).

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