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LITERARY CRITICISM
must usually have meant in practice. 1 Then, because grammarian and rhetor
had always overlapped and tended more and more to fuse, 2 there are rhetorical
analyses of speeches, usually very sketchy; the remarks on Anna's speech at 31
as a suasoria are fuller than most. There are portentous pronouncements on
religious practice, with Aeneas and Dido forced into a mould of priest and
priestess (374, etc.). There are occasional hints at allegory (so at 114), a common
fate for poetry from Crates to Tiberius Claudius Donatus. Figures are occasionally
identified (276, etc.), riddles propounded and solved (262: why did
Aeneas wear a bejewelled sword to supervise the building of Carthage?). This,
with the pabulum of explication, leaves little room for anything we should
regard as literary criticism.
But that is perhaps too hasty a judgement. The occasional condescending
pat on the back for Virgil - bene.. . - sometimes prefaces a shrewd point. Thus
at 403 the commentator remarks on the 'sublimity' lent by military metaphor
to the description of ants. There are modern critics who would be proud to have
connected the wounded stag in the Dictaean woods (73) with the herb dittany
(dictamnurri) that was reputed to heal the wounds of wild beasts, as we know that
Virgil knew (Aen. 12.414). And suggestive recent work on ' multiple-correspondence
' similes in Virgil 3 finds firm roots in the remarks of the commentator
at 442-5.
We should bring this sort of balance to our judgement on Macrobius, who
after all makes Servius participate in the conversation that forms the Saturnalia,
and who was clearly drawing on largely grammatical or antiquarian sources.
There are the same weaknesses. 'Where grammatici are criticized, it is for failing
to raise a quaestlo of their own kind (as at 5.18.3). To prove his own enthusiasm
for the fray, one speaker proudly produces the recondite information that
Euripides was reproved by Aristotle for saying it was the left foot rather than
the right that Aetolians kept unshod (5.18.16—20). And there is a tendency to
see Virgil as always right: 'there is another way of defending the use of the
word inlaudatus', someone significantly remarks (6.7.16). At the same time,
Macrobius had a certain feel for the relativity of critical judgements: Met no
one think old poets worthless just because their verses seem rough (scairi) to
us' (6.3.9) ~ an d this at a day when men did not care for the archaic (6.4.1; cf.
6.9.9). There is nothing to be ashamed of in the appraisal of Homer as a poet
who showed ' not only grandeur but also simplicity, vividness (praesentiarri) of
language, and silent dignity' (5.13.40). And when it came to detailed assessment,
modem studies of the catalogue in Aeneid 7* do not go far beyond the
remarks in 5.15—16, where Homer's catalogue is compared, with due comment
1 Quintilian 1.8.18 (with Colson's note) and 1.10.46—8.
1 For early instances, Suet. Gramm. 4.6, 7.3. For later, Marrou (1958) 10 n. 2.
3 West (1969).
4 E.g. Williams (1961). Macrobius doubtless had his sources, here as elsewhere.
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