Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

VERSE
Lines of similar structure too often occur in close proximity; and in that long
piece from the De consulatu suo 18 out of 19 successive lines (47—65) end in a
trisyllable or quasi-trisyllable.
In celebrating his own deeds Cicero followed the ancient convention of
sticking to the tradition of the genre. He incongruously adopted the whole epic
paraphernalia of Ennius. Ennius had told of the apotheosis of Romulus,
received into the Council of the Gods. Cicero apparently described the Dichterweihe
of Cicero, welcomed to Olympus by Jupiter and taught the arts by
Minerva. Further, he adopted the grand manner we have seen to be characteristic
of at least his earlier oratory, along with archaisms of language which
are also features of his verse translations. Ancient critical opinion was in any
case inclined to consider grandiloquence, the os magnum, an essential of real
poetry (e.g. Horace, Sat. 1.4.44). The passage referred to above, put into the
mouth of the Muse Urania, is monotonously 'rhetorical', and we may suspect
that the rest was similarly inflated. Post-Virgilian critics who belittled him as a
poet may not have been mistaken absolutely, though they may not have
realized the advance he represented as a versifier. All his life he wrote verse as a
gentleman's pastime, like other contemporaries, including his brother Quintus,
who while serving in Britain polished off four tragedies in sixteen days. Under
Caesar's dictatorship he 'amused himself, Plutarch says (Cic. 40), by sometimes
composing up to five hundred lines in a night. Clearly he lacked that respect
for poetry as an art which led the neoteric Cinna to spend nine years over his
short epic Zmyrna and Virgil seven years over his Georgics. Yet he produced
not a few fine lines; and his incidental verse translations of Homer and Greek
tragedy in his philosophical works are at least dignified (they include a precious
28-line passage from the lost Prometheus unboundof Aeschylus: Tusc. 2.23—5).
It is worth comparing Aratus' text with Cicero's free translation, of which we
possess 581 lines, half as much as the original. This youthful work, occasionally
archaic in metre as in vocabulary, has some errors; but it exhibits, in Munro's
words, 'much spirit and vivacity of language'. In the Weather-signs we may
detect touches not in Aratus — rhetorical intensification, 'onomatopoeic'
expressiveness, hints of personal observation, and the ascription of human
feelings to animals and of animation to the inanimate, all of which presage, if
they did not actually prompt, the Virgil of the Georgics. l
5. LETTERS
The letter became a literary-rhetorical form in the Hellenistic age. Timotheus
employed Isocrates to compose his despatches on campaign. Artemo published
Alexander's letters. Epicurus, following Plato, used letter form and Isocratean
1 Malcovati (1943) 248—9; G. B. Townend in Dorey (1965) 113—16.
247
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008