This volume collects essays in honour of Theodore Papanghelis occasioned by his sixty-fifth birthday and (as the title indicates) largely inspired by and in homage to his 1987 work Propertius: A Hellenistic Poet of Love and Death. It is a generously conceived and proportioned collection, comprising seventeen contributions from scholars of international renown that collectively engage with how Latin poetry and its received tradition mine the conceptual veins of life, love and death in shaping their narrative understandings. Such an undertaking is performed from an appreciably wide range of critical perspectives: the stalwart fare of textual exegesis is complemented by a wide range of theoretical frameworks used to articulate these readings. It is a collection thoughtfully and graciously informed by the spirit of its honorand, a scholar not only of tremendous classical learning, but also one who readily applies literary and theoretical interpretations to modern European works, lends aesthetic artistry to translations, and visibly champions the value of humanistic learning.
After a prologue and introduction, the volume is organised into five parts, four according to genre and the fifth devoted to reception. Fittingly, the first and most substantial portion is devoted to elegy, where six scholars approach this genre of love and loss with especially prominent strands of Papanghelistic influence and interest. Roy Gibson's thought-experiment on the Propertian psyche (ch. 1) refreshingly interrogates the applicability of systematic philosophical frameworks to the elegiac sensibility of a serious Propertius, balanced by Gareth Williams’ refining take on a confounding moment of Propertian narrative, the pair of 4.7 and 4.8 (ch. 3). Williams fans out the alternative realities presented by these poems whilst advancing a view of Cynthia's frustrating physical evanescence in 4.7 as not just poetically purposeful, but epitomisingly symbolic. By contrast, Jacqueline Fabre-Serris (ch. 2) deals with the deliberately corporeal poetics of a Propertian series that reveals sophisticated interplay on revising the nature of passion, as first delineated by Lucretius and subsequently manipulated and modified by Gallus and Virgil, reinforcing the line of poetic influence between Lucretius and Propertius. Like Fabre-Serris, Stephen Harrison (ch. 6) also deals with questions of poetic influence, this time not regarding a sequential series of inheritance; he reopens the question of inspirational directionality between Ovid and Propertius and Horace, identifying thematic moments in Propertius 4 and Odes 4 that could constitute responses to a new prodigious poetic voice in Rome. This straightforward, text-based approach resonates with Stephen Heyworth's (ch. 4) couching of textual criticism in his mapping of notable elegiac spaces in Tibullus, Lygdamus and Sulpicia and their corresponding eroto-emotive registers. William Batstone (ch. 5) focuses on Sulpicia, putting the ‘she’ into the shell game of power-play within the competitive male world of elegy by examining the self-aware linguistic futility of her syntactical Escherisms in confrontation with the amicus poems.
Imperial epic (Part II) is fielded by Alison Sharrock (ch. 7), who holds a narratological lens to the Ovidian love-after-death episodes of Orpheus and Narcissus and the consequences of their bodily divisions into the lower and upper world. This thematic emphasis on spatial division and fragmentation is continued by David Konstan on Lucan (ch. 8), who examines the orienting axis of up versus down as one centre of meaning for this interpretationally fraught epic. After the fever pitch of Lucan, Part III offers three scholarly views on a generic melange, inaugurated by Andrew Feldherr (ch. 9); he uses intertextuality to cross-examine the mutually illuminating dynamic of cultural and poetic temporality displayed by Sallust's Sempronia (Cat. 25) and Horace's Lyce (4.13). The realm of the temporal is subsequently exchanged for the spatial and sensory, as Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi (ch. 10) locates Sappho's erotic performance in Ovid's Epistula Sapphus within the philosophical matrix of aesthetic experience, between Plato's sensorily sundered world of art and impulse and Epicurus’ more permissive stance; the Epicurean cooperative accord between the senses and aesthetic delight exemplified by this Sapphic performance in the epistle is then used to illuminate moments of ‘Ovidian’ sensual musicality in Proust. These two chapters of paired texts are rounded out by Alison Keith (ch. 11), who stays with philosophy to show how Catalepton 5 participates actively in the grounding of poetic practice within Epicurean language, theory and implementation, especially through detailed allusion to extant Epicurean works and Lucretius.
The weightiness of philosophical import is exchanged for a Part IV of lighter tone, grouping together Roman drama and the novel. Stavros Frangoulidis (ch. 12) reaffirms the contextual importance of the Aphrodisia festival in Plautus’ Poenulus for the significant dramatic trajectories within the play, further conceptually and comedically marked by Milphio's meta-dramatic machinations. The dramatic outlook changes from comedy to tragedy with David Wray's contribution on Seneca (ch. 13), but without a loss of light-heartedness. Taking Oedipus as his primary focus, Wray wryly reads the ‘divas’ of Senecan tragedy using queer theory's ‘art of failure’ as an aesthetically organising principle, suggesting that the character traits of these divas are explicable not according to historical context, but to the Stoic delineation of man's plight to be utter failures in the attempt to attain sagedom — a failure that, in the hands of the poetically pyrotechnic Seneca, becomes multivalently spectacular. Niall Slater (ch. 14) trades on the idea of not trajectories but boundaries in his explication of Petronius’ inset Milesian tale of the Ephesian Widow, looking at not only the boundaries between life and death and chastity and (consummated) lust, ultimately controlled by the Widow, but also the textual boundaries between the inset tale and the wider narrative and the evidence of their permeability in perceptible acts of emotive mirroring.
The final portion of the collection (Part V: Reception) is dedicated to two fascinating neo-Latin texts and their translations, and a final return to pathos in the form of tracing Eurydice's plight as it appears in the voices of modern poets. The first text is the Chronis, an anonymous sixteenth-century Latin eclogue, revived here under the careful treatment of Andrew Laird (ch. 15). After giving a brief history of the text, Laird speculates on the circumstances of its composition and assesses its stylistically professed literary influences and potential religious underpinnings before reproducing a text with translation and accompanying guide to intertextual allusion. The second is Peter Causton's Londini Conflagratio, a poem on the Fire of London which Gesine Manuwald (ch. 16) admirably contextualises, interprets for its perspectival originality and translates for the first time into English. Efrossini Spentzou closes the collection by looking at Eurydice's newly literarily prominent, answering ‘voice’ through the modern poets Rainer Maria Rilke, Carol Ann Duffy and Louise Glück, untangling the tonal modulations of the modern incarnations of the classical feminine shadow of the archetypal male artist, Orpheus.
The intellectual command and merit of this volume is indisputable; the reader's pleasure is, however, slightly marred by a few notable infelicities in copy-editing. The variant citation styles, although foregrounded as editorial benevolence towards authorial independence, are to a continuous reader distracting; this collection offers much in being so treated, for there are many significant thematic pairings of contributions (e.g. Peponi with both Spentzou and Part I overall). Stylistic continuity would have promoted these harmonies; the volume is nevertheless a welcome tribute, and its thought-provoking content will provide any reader with many avenues of inspiration to ruminate upon and, hopefully, to follow.
