Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- CONTRIBUTORS
- Prologue
- 1 DE IMITATIONE
- 2 PLAVTVS VORTIT BARB ARE: Plautus, Bacchides 526–61 and Menander, Dis exapaton 102–12
- 3 FROM POLYPHEMUS TO CORYDON: Virgil, Eclogue 2 and the Idylls of Theocritus
- 4 TWO PLAGUES: Virgil, Georgics 3.478–566 and Lucretius 6.1090–1286
- 5 HORATIAN IMITATIO AND ODES 2.5
- 6 IVDICIVM TRANSFERENDI: Virgil, Aeneid 2.469–505 and its antecedents
- 7 SELF-IMITATION WITHIN A GENERIC FRAMEWORK: Ovid, Amores 2.9 and 3.11 and the renuntiatio amoris
- 8 SELF-IMITATION AND THE SUBSTANCE OF HISTORY: Tacitus, Annals 1.61–5 and Histories 2.70, 5.14–15
- 9 LENTE CVRRITE, NOCTIS EQVI: Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde 3.1422–70, Donne, The Sun Rising and Ovid, Amores 1.13
- 10 PYRAMUS AND THISBE IN SHAKESPEARE AND OVID: A Midsummer Night's Dream and Metamorphoses 4.1–166
- 11 EPILOGUE
- Notes
- Abbreviations and bibliography
- Select indexes
1 - DE IMITATIONE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- CONTRIBUTORS
- Prologue
- 1 DE IMITATIONE
- 2 PLAVTVS VORTIT BARB ARE: Plautus, Bacchides 526–61 and Menander, Dis exapaton 102–12
- 3 FROM POLYPHEMUS TO CORYDON: Virgil, Eclogue 2 and the Idylls of Theocritus
- 4 TWO PLAGUES: Virgil, Georgics 3.478–566 and Lucretius 6.1090–1286
- 5 HORATIAN IMITATIO AND ODES 2.5
- 6 IVDICIVM TRANSFERENDI: Virgil, Aeneid 2.469–505 and its antecedents
- 7 SELF-IMITATION WITHIN A GENERIC FRAMEWORK: Ovid, Amores 2.9 and 3.11 and the renuntiatio amoris
- 8 SELF-IMITATION AND THE SUBSTANCE OF HISTORY: Tacitus, Annals 1.61–5 and Histories 2.70, 5.14–15
- 9 LENTE CVRRITE, NOCTIS EQVI: Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde 3.1422–70, Donne, The Sun Rising and Ovid, Amores 1.13
- 10 PYRAMUS AND THISBE IN SHAKESPEARE AND OVID: A Midsummer Night's Dream and Metamorphoses 4.1–166
- 11 EPILOGUE
- Notes
- Abbreviations and bibliography
- Select indexes
Summary
One of the inescapable features of Latin literature is that almost every author, in almost everything he writes, acknowledges his antecedents, his predecessors – in a word, the tradition in which he was bred. This phenomenon, for which the technical terms are imitatio or (in Greek) mimēsis, is not peculiar to Latin; the statement I have just made about Latin writers would also be true very generally of Greek. In fact, the relationship between the Latin genres and their Greek exemplars may best be seen as a special case of a general Greco-Roman acceptance of imitation as an essential element in all literary composition. Of course, the business of translation was difficult, and victory over the patrii sermonis egestas a notable thing. The boast of having given Rome her own Aeolium or Ascraeum carmen was made with justifiable pride. But we must not make too much of this. The exemplaria Graeca of Horace (Ars poetica 268–9) were to be thumbed night and day not because they were Greek but because they were good. Horace (ibid. i32ff.) warns the would-be poet against slavish copying of tradition:
nee uerbo uerbum curabis reddere, fidus
interpres, nee desilies imitator in artum
unde pedem proferre pudor uetet aut operis lex.
Nor will you take pains to render word for word, like a scrupulous interpreter, or jump down, as you imitate, into some little hole from which shame or the rules of the work wont let you escape.
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- Creative Imitation and Latin Literature , pp. 1 - 16Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1979
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