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

AUTHOR AND PUBLIC
his work on a smaller circle. There were good practical reasons for this, founded
in the character of ancient publication. Once a book was in full circulation, there
was no effective means of correcting it, let alone recalling it. Second thoughts
therefore were likely to be unavailing; a corrected second edition could not be
guaranteed to supersede the first. Horace puts the matter in a nutshell when he
warns intending authors to show their work to competent critics and to keep it
by them for revision for nine years before launching it into the -world: nescit
uox missa reuerti 'the word once uttered cannot be recalled' {A.P. 386—90).
Some at least of the poets who died leaving their •work to be published by their
executors — Lucretius, Catullus (?), Virgil, Persius — may have been actuated
by a desire to postpone the irrevocable moment as long as possible. The feelings
of Virgil on the subject were indeed so acute that he tried to ensure that his
uncompleted Aeneid should perish with him (fit. Donat. 39).
It was, then, even more important than it is today for a writer to submit his
work to the test of critical opinion before publication. For the younger Pliny
and his friends — though his circle cannot be taken as entirely representative —
this became almost an obsession: 'la precaution a degenere en tic'. 1 This is
where the coterie might assume considerable importance. Books or portions
of books were read aloud to a small audience of friends, who were invited to
criticize freely what they heard. The origins of this custom go back at least to
Hellenistic Alexandria: the variations on the same themes that we encounter in
the epigrams of Callimachus and Asclepiades represent a critical as well as a
creative activity, practised for a small audience of cultured friends round the
dinner-table. About literary coteries at Rome before the age of Cicero we are
ill informed. The so-called 'Scipionic circle'—the literary friends of Scipio
Aemilianus Africanus Numantinus (185—129 B.C.), who included Terence and
Lucilius — cannot on the basis of the extant evidence be shown to have represented
any shared artistic position. 2 Similarly the poets who towards the end
of the second century B.C. were writing Latin epigrams on the Hellenistic
pattern — Valerius Aedituus, Porcius Licinus, Q. Lutatius Catulus — cannot be
proved to have formed a group with common aims. 3 It is -with Catullus that we
first encounter clear evidence of something like a full-blown literary circle,
wedded to the Callimachean idea of a poetic programme and a doctrinaire view
of poetry. 4
Under the Principate the sort of private and informal criticism that must
have played a part in shaping many of Catullus' poems and that still nourished
among Pliny's acquaintance began to yield pride of place to a more public kind
1
Guillemin (1937) 37; cf. Burr (1959) 59.
2
Astin (1967) 294, affirming that the term is 'essentially an invention of modern scholarship'.
3
Ross (1969^) 142.
4
Guillemin (1937) 36, Clausen (1964) 189. On the possible connexion of the grammarian Valerius
Cato with Catullus and the 'Neoterics' cf. Crowther (1971) 108—9.
II
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