The Shield of Achilles

I recently sat down and read through The Shield of Achilles, a slim volume of poetry by W. H. Auden that won the 1956 National Book Award for Poetry, drawn in by the classical title (and a sense of vague inadequacy that I had not previously read any Auden). It’s a lovely little collection, organised into three sequences of poems, each poem with its own style and meter. The first group, titled Bucolics, clearly sees itself as the descendant of Virgil’s Georgics and the tradition of bucolic poetry; every poem praises a different part of the natural world – Winds, Woods, Mountains and so on. The third group plays with the sequence of liturgical hours and walks through the process of a Good Friday (perhaps, sometimes, maybe, the Good Friday). The middle group, In Sunshine and In Shade, does not have quite such an obvious uniting theme, but tends towards examining modern mankind through an ancient lens.

With that in mind, I want to look at the first poem of the In Sunshine and In Shade grouping, the eponymous Shield of Achilles poem – I’ll quote the text, and then make a very few comments on it, as in the main it speaks for itself.

The eroticization of knowledge in the Priapea – a preview

I seem to be having a good run with abstracts at the moment – first I was accepted for the Animating Antiquity conference (for which, incidentally, booking is now open), and now I’ve heard that I’ve had my paper accepted for Feminism and Classics VI in May! This is brilliant news for two reasons. First, it means I get to go back to North America and check in with some of my friends and colleagues from my six years in the US – you know, reassure them I haven’t grown an extra head, that sort of thing. Second, it finally gives me a chance to road-test an idea I’ve been sitting on since 2007 and that I’ve wanted the opportunity to come back to.

Every year, the Rutgers classics department participates in something called Latinfest, or the Latin Day Colloquium if you want to be more formal about it, along with Columbia, NYU, Penn and Princeton. The idea is to take a relatively unfamiliar Latin text which hasn’t had a great deal of scholarship done on it, and to put it at the centre of a day’s conference/seminar/discussion. Each of the five schools takes a section of the text, and graduates from each school give a short presentation on various relevant topics before opening up to more general discussion on each segment. It’s a great way of presenting in a friendly atmosphere and exploring an unfamiliar text, and I’m actually quite keen to import it to the UK. (I think one of Penn’s graduates has already taken the idea successfully to Germany, so there is precedent.)

Undiscovered treasures – the Laus Pisonis

I’m loving the fact that working on the Ad Polybium is taking me to some really strange places, mostly to attempt to work out what ‘stereotypical panegyric’ looks like. One big response I got from my reading group on the original article draft was a sense that the features I was pointing out formed part of the ‘normal’ panegyric repertoire – but I have to say that after going through the secondary literature and doing a bit of digging in the primary sources, I’m becoming less and less convinced about what a panegyric trope actually looks like and whether anyone’s proven one exists. Sure, we know what panegyric feels like, but I’m starting to have my doubts about dismissing something from anything in the early imperial period as a ‘trope’ without a lot more groundwork.

The text I want to talk about today is called the Laus Pisonis, or “the praise of Piso”. We’re fairly sure that the Piso in question is Calpurnius Piso, who was one of the ringleaders in a plot to assassinate the Emperor Nero; it was this same plot that Seneca and his nephew Lucan got incriminated in and were killed over, which gives some pleasing syncronicity to investigating it. The text is about 260 lines long and takes the form of poetry – and, I’m afraid to say, for the first dozen lines or so it really is dreadful poetry. I suspect this may be an artefact of the “introductions are hard” phenomenon that anyone who does any academic writing is very familiar with, because once the poet has got into his stride, he starts having quite a lot of fun with the language. (We have No Idea who wrote the Laus; it was preserved in a 1527 edition of Ovid by Sichard, who says it was traditionally attributed to Virgil, and various medieval compilations say it was written by Lucan, but this typifies the desire to hang orphan texts on famous names rather than anything approximating cast iron proof of authorship.)

I have a couple of thoughts about the text which are based mainly on what jumped out at me while I was translating the piece for myself, and some kind pointers from Ted Gellar-Goad over on Twitter. Ted responded to my tweet that olorinus, meaning of or belong to a swan, was a great word that I hadn’t seen before by pointing out that choosing that word was actually an important poetic choice – what the poet arguably should have done was pick cycneus, derived from the Greek word for swan, rather than the native Latin word, thereby signalling his allegiance to a certain kind of Callimachean poetry. Now, I’m not an expert on Callimachean poetry by any means, but suddenly a lot of other things about the poem’s style fell into place – the heavy reliance on lots of obscure mythological references and adjectives, for instance. The poet is clearly putting himself into a firm poetic camp, although I suspect it may be a Roman home-grown neoteric one rather than a strictly Callimachean one – he uses the word lepos, meaning smooth, at line 163, and that’s a notorious catchword for the neoterics, whose most famous member was Catullus. So while I can’t unpick precisely what’s going on here in terms of poetic agenda, there’s obviously something being said about allegiance and Roman-ness and style that’s worth unravelling.