The Augment in the Fragments of the Epic Cycle and Other Fragmentary Greek Epic

I discuss the use of the augment in fragmentary hexametric Greek texts outside of early epic Greek (Homer, Hesiod, and the Homeric Hymns) and the mock-epic works (such as the Batrakhomyomakhia). I quote them after West 2003 but also analyze fragments that are not found in West. I determine the metrically secure forms, discuss previous scholarship on the meaning of the augment in epic Greek, and then proceed to the actual analysis. For my investigation, I divide the fragments in three categories: first, those that can be analyzed; second, those that have fewer forms and that allow for an analysis but require more caution than those of the first category; and third, the ones that have no or not enough metrically secure forms but are still intellegible. The starting point for my investigation is that the augment had near-deictic/visual-evidential meaning and that it was used in focused and highlighted passages as well as to emphasize new information. This is confirmed by the fragments, but as was the case in the larger epic corpus, there are exceptions to the rules in the Cycle as well.

Private Experience and Public-Spirited Critique: Brexit-Era Britain in the Recent Poetry of Vidyan Ravinthiran and Nicholas Hagger

Two starkly different aspects of the Brexit phenomenon may be seen in the recent work of two British poets, Vidyan Ravinthiran and Nicholas Hagger. Ravinthiran’s most recent book consists of love sonnets composed for his wife. These are addressed to an intimate “you” which, upon publication, is expanded to vicariously include his readership. In the course of their everyday life as a mixed-race couple in northern England, the context of Brexit occasionally intrudes. When it leads him to communicate something to his wife, the poet organically transcribes these experiences. While ultimately a secondary (if often inescapable) theme in Ravinthiran’s sonnet sequence, the Brexit negotiations are the leitmotif of Hagger’s Fools’ Paradise. Taking his cue from the sixteenth and seventeenth century mock epic, the poet offers an erudite satire excoriating a short-sighted political class. Hagger appears to move easily in such circles, presumably due to the diplomatic and intelligence contacts in his past. Assuming the guise of an insider or pundit, “your poet” provides a meticulous, tactical critique of the inefficacy of foolish parliamentarians.

Cervantine Poetry

Even during his own lifetime, Cervantes was labelled a bad poet, but renewed scholarly interest in his verse over the years has revealed a sophisticated poet writing in a competitive milieu. Throughout his prose works he refers consistently to the function, the value, and the qualities that this ‘sweet art’ should possess, returning somewhat obsessively to the topic, and produced his great mock epic, Viaje del Parnaso, towards the end of his life. This chapter addresses the lack of critical attention to his poetry and studies the context in which Cervantes composed them.

THE CULEX’S METAPOETIC FUNERARY GARDEN

The Culex is now widely recognized as a piece of post-Ovidian, possibly Tiberian, pseudo-juvenilia written by an author impersonating the young Virgil, although it was attached to Virgil's name already in the first century c.e., being identified as Virgilian by Statius, Suetonius and Martial. Dedicated to the young Octavian (Octaui in line 1), the poem seems to fill a biographical gap in Virgil's career before his composition of the Eclogues. It is introduced as a ludus, which Irene Peirano suggests may openly refer to ‘the act of impersonating Virgil’, and, like many of the poems in the Appendix Vergiliana, it seems to have a parodic intent. The Culex has been interpreted as a parody of neoteric style and the epyllion, as mock-epic, as Virgil parody (John Henderson called it a ‘spoof Aeneid in bucolic drag’), as pointed Augustan satire, as mock Ovidian ‘Weltgedicht’ and as just very bad poetry (Housman's ‘stutterer’). Glenn Most has observed that the poem's three ‘acts’ structurally recapitulate Virgil's three major works in chronological succession. Little attention, however, has been paid to the Culex's final lines, which contain a catalogue of flowers the pastor places on the gnat's tomb. Recent scholarship has reintroduced an older interpretation of the gnat's tomb as a political allegory of Augustus’ Mausoleum; in this paper I suggest instead that the tomb and its flowers serve a closural and metapoetic function at the end of the poem.

Jaan Bergmanni pilaeepos „Jaaniida“: tekst, kontekst ja intertekst / Jaan Bergmann’s mock-epic Jaaniida: text, context and intertext

Mock-epics were first created already in the antiquity and the most famous of them, the Batrachomyomachia, was translated into Estonian already in 1875 by Jaan Bergmann; it was also the first full translation of an ancient epic poem into Estonian. However, until now, no Estonian original mock-epics were known and this genre was presumed to have evolved in Estonian literature only in the 20th century, mostly used in parodies of the national epic, the Kalevipoeg. In this issue, we introduce a new archival find from Jaan Bergmann’s manuscript poetry book. We discovered that, having probably been inspired by the Batrachomyomachia, but perhaps also by Nikolay Osipov’s Eneida (1791), Jaan Bergmann had created his own mock-heroic poem Jaaniida (1875). It is a multidimensional and poetically rich poem, interweaving different verse cultures and different eras. On the one hand, its analysis reveals clear influences of the Odyssey: there are parallels with the portrayal of the main hero, images and the plot, as well as with the Homeric epic techniques (for example, both epics begin with the prooemium, which contains an invocation). But in terms of poetic devices and versification, Jaaniida draws on Estonian folk songs, using the folk meter, plenty of alliteration and assonance as well as parallelism, and imitating their morphology and vocabulary. The storyline of the poem features events that appear to have happened only recently before the writing of the text (most probably in 1866–1875): the transition from villeinage to money rent and the cases of corruption among local administrators. Against this background, Bergmann satirically pictures the rise of an individual and his later downfall caused by his weaknesses and vices.

Epic meals: Who should read epic poetry in Rome?

In this paper, the presence of food and dinners in connection with epic poetry in three different Juvenalian poems is discussed. The first is Satire 4 containing a mock-epic, the plot of which revolves around a giant turbot that is described with epic-style elements, and that is given to the emperor Domitian characterized by uncontrolled gluttony. The other two poems, Satires 5 and 11, both focusing on dinner parties, are in connection with the epic genre as well: while in the closing poem of Book 1, several epic connotations appear in the description of the gluttonous Virro’s extravagant dinner, in Satire 11, the enjoyment of epic poetry is praised and compared to an almost pornographic dance performance in a luxurious feast. Reading the three poems together, it might be proved from another aspect that we have to make a distinction between the Juvenalian evaluation of topics described using epic-style elements and the epic poetry itself.

A ORIGEM DO ESTRANHAMENTO: PROVOCAÇÕES INTERTEXTUAIS EM EU, TITUBA, FEITICEIRA... NEGRA DE SALEM

Este trabalho tem por objetivo investigar a origem do estranhamento provocado pela leitura de Eu, Tituba, feiticeira... Negra de Salem (1986), de Maryse Condé. Ambientada no século XVII, o livro trata de Tituba, negra natural da ilha de Barbados e escravizada na América do Norte. Conforme as teorias Leonor Arfuch (2010), Ingedore Koch (2012) e Ritchie Robertson (2009), a análise revela que Eu, Tituba... é, estilisticamente, uma espécie de mock-epic pós-moderno, projetada com o intuito consciente de desafiar os códigos de expectativa do receptor. Uma performance poética que celebra a cultura e a espiritualidade caribenhas, com fortes elementos de fantasia, interpelando temas como racismo, misoginia, a opressão das estruturas coloniais e o apagamento do negro da história.