The Good Poem According to Philodemus
MICHAEL M c OSKER
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McOsker, Michael, author.
Title: The good poem according to Philodemus / Michael McOsker. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021016477 (print) | LCCN 2021016478 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190912819 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190912833 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Philodemus, approximately 110 B.C.-approximately 40 B.C. On poems. | Poetics—History—To 1500. | Greek poetry—History and criticism—Theory, etc. | LCGFT: Literary criticism.
Classification: LCC PA4271.P4 M36 2021 (print) | LCC PA4271.P4 (ebook) | DDC 808.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016477
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016478
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190912819.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
To my parents, Liz and Paul.
§5
§7
§7a The Anonymous Critics in Philomelus
§7c Demetrius of Byzantium
§8
§9
§10
§11
§9a Diogenes of
§9b The Anonymous Stoic (Formerly Known as Aristo)
3. Poetry as Technē and the Use of
§1
§2 The Hypographē of Technē and the “Technicity of Rhetoric”
§5
4.
§1
5.
§1
§3
§4
§5
§1
§7
§8
§9
Preface
It is perhaps a measure of how poetry-focused Classics, or at least the Hellenic half of it, is that Philodemus’ On Poems is one of, if not the, best studied work from Herculaneum. (Its only real competition is Epicurus’ On Nature.) There are a few causes: hope (now largely abandoned) for extensive new fragments of poetry and prejudice (also largely abandoned) against Epicureanism must rank high among them, not to mention the paucity of Herculaneumists and the staggering amount of work left to do.
I continue the trend of favoring Epicurus’ epigonos, Philodemus of Gadara. The bulk of this book is dedicated primarily to explaining Philodemus’ poetics and, in a far distant second place, situating them in the realms of Epicurean philosophy and Hellenistic literary criticism. This can finally be done with some security, since the texts are well edited and unlikely to cause seismic disturbances under the feet of future scholars.1 But just because they are well edited does not mean that they are straightforward or easy to read. On the contrary, Philodemus’ prose is not simple at the best of times, and he does not honor modern scholarly conventions of straightforward citation or clarity in argumentation, which makes simply sorting out who said what a good deal of work for his modern readers. It is here that I hope to make my main contribution: to put future students of Philodemus’ poetics on reasonably solid footing by describing as complete and coherent a picture of his views (and at least a summary of his opponents’ views) as possible. If along the way I manage to say something of interest to students of ancient literary criticism, Epicurean philosophy, or ancient poetry, all the better.
Translations of the On Music, most of the On Rhetoric, and other Epicureans are usually based on those published in the editions, though I have silently intervened in many cases. This is most visible in Sider’s translations of Philodemus’ epigrams, which I’ve rewritten quite freely according to my taste and to emphasize features I think are interesting in light of Philodemus’ theories. My alterations to Janko’s and Armstrong’s translations of the On Poems (Janko for I–IV;
1 It must be said that the On Poems has received the majority of editorial and interpretive work. The On Music, because it is the least extensively preserved of the three treatises on the fine arts, is also in good editorial shape. The Rhetoric has received some, but not nearly as much, and it is much more extensively preserved. Even so, students of Philodemus’ aesthetic theories are at a comparative advantage over students of his ethics, since most of the ethical works have not received more than a single edition from 1800 onwards (the On Death, On Anger, On Frank Speech, and On Household Management are notable exceptions).
Armstrong for V), as well as Smith’s Lucretius, are less extensive. I have used Chandler’s translations of Rhetoric I and II similarly.
The Greek printed is quoted from the editions named; any changes to the text itself are noted ad loc. (I do not always record changes to punctuation.) I have left the orthography of the papyri unchanged, but occasionally noted weirder forms. The Leiden conventions for printing papyrological texts are followed with the following adjustment: any letter which is clearly transmitted (whether on the papyrus, in a digital photograph, or on a disegno), but nevertheless changed by an editor, is marked by an under-asterisk, like so: τὴν will be printed when the papyrus or other primary source for the text clearly reads πην. This is because the papyri were copied so soon after their composition that many feel that even minor editorial interference ought to be signaled to the readers.2 I agree with them and so follow the convention. Note also that under-dots are used only in cases when the reading is doubtful—that is, when it could be a different letter— but not in cases of a damaged, but clearly legible, letter. The test is purely paleographic: for example, I print τὴν even when the only other reading possible is τπν, even if τπν is complete nonsense. I have silently eliminated most other marks, whether on the papyrus or editorial, including vacats, space fillers, and most ancient punctuation (which usually corresponds to modern punctuation anyway). I have privileged the legibility of the text as much as possible, but tried not to hide the difficulty of the papyri. I do not attempt to provide an apparatus for any of the texts. For details, see the editions.
I have represented the texts in columns as they are on papyri, rather than running the text together. I personally find this easier to read—I find long lines hard on my eyes when they are burdened with additional papyrological sigla—and it makes patterns of damage more apparent, which is useful for judging possible supplements and corrections. The line numbers are also easier to track when discussing details. When words are divided across lines, I mark this with a hyphen, which does not correspond to anything on the original text and is purely editorial. Lower half-brackets ( ˻αβγ˼ ) mark text supplied from a parallel source, either a second manuscript of the same text (e.g., in the case of On Rhetoric III) or a quotation that survives more completely in another source. For complete details as to the constitution of the text and readings, as well as citations for emendations, see the editions.
This book, like so many, began life as a doctoral dissertation. That dissertation began life as a presentation, in Ewen Bowie’s Garland of Philip seminar, given when he visited the University of Michigan for a semester in spring
2 In so doing I follow the practice of, for example, Richard Janko and Giuliana Leone. The specific siglum varies by time and publisher (e.g., Leone’s edition of On Nature II, from Bibliopolis, uses ˹α˺ to mark that a letter has been changed into an alpha). Further, precise conventions for the use of the under-asterisk vary by editor; for example, Obbink only uses it to mark a changed disegno.
2010. I attempted without much success to ferret out a connection between Philodemus’ theorizing and his epigrams, and the resulting paper was . . . not very good. I owe a great deal to Ewen and to Matts Cohn and Newman for their initial comments and the suggestion that there might still be a “there” there, despite the dull thud the paper made when it hit my audience. Thanks to them, I shelved rather than trashed the project and expected to write my thesis on the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite.
After that project was scooped, I came back to that seminar paper. Since, at the time, about three-fifths of the primary source material—books II–IV of the On Poems—existed only as draft editions that Richard Janko was willing to make available to me, I felt confident that I wouldn’t get scooped again. My initial prospectus, treated with kindness and fully deserved skepticism by its readers, had me sorting out Philodemus’ poetics in one chapter and then going on to treat Callimachus and basically all the other important Hellenistic poets and theorists in another two or three chapters. Obviously, in hindsight, that was not going to be the case. Philodemus’ share ballooned and eventually became the whole dissertation. (Maybe one day I’ll get around to Callimachus.)
My debts to the studies of Nicola Pace and Anastasia TsakiropoulouSummers, and above all to Nathan Greenberg, will be obvious to those who know their work. Likewise, I learned a great deal from Liz Asmis’ and David Armstrong’s articles. While a grad student, after my work was somewhat advanced, I had the privilege of spending a year and a half in Naples as a fellow at the Centro internazionale per lo studio dei papiri ercolanesi (CISPE). CISPE later gave me another borsa to return to Naples for a month. That tirocino represented a quantum leap in my knowledge of the texts and their problems. I owe a debt to Paolo Asso for his tutoring in Italian (and Neapolitan) and the occasional meal; to Francesca Longo Auricchio, Giovanni Indelli, Giuliana Leone, Gianluca del Mastro, Matilde Fiorillo, and Antonio Parisi, for their warm welcome, help, and friendship. Special thanks go to Mariacristina Fimiani and the other denizens of Casa Caracciolo.
My dissertation committee consisted of Victor Caston, Francesca Schironi, and Ruth Scodel, with Richard Janko as chair. For their help and criticism, and for being models of scholarship, I thank them all, but Richard deserves special thanks. It’s a cliché of the “preface” genre that a dissertation would not have been possible without the advisor, but in my case the work really would have been impossible had Richard not made a tremendous amount of work available to me in draft form years (in one case, more than a decade) before it would appear in print. I valued and value his help and guidance more than I can say.
The book continued its gestation after my defense, and I continued to incur debts. A nigh mythological trio of Davids (Armstrong, Blank, and Kaufman) answered questions, read drafts, discussed problems at conferences and over
phone calls, and gave me material ahead of publication—one even coauthored a different book with me, and one was a press reader for this book. The Fondation Hardt gave me a fellowship for a three-week stay, during which I was able to make a good deal of progress in a short period of time in outstanding circumstances with very pleasant and learned people. Jeffrey Fish has been a wonderful friend, discussed problems with me, and made his draft edition of On the Good King According to Homer available to me. David Armstrong and Jeffrey Fish gave me their draft edition of On Poems V, which was extremely useful and for which I am very grateful. The Würzburgers, Michael Erler, Holger Essler, Jan Heßler, and Kilian Fleischer, have supported me and my work in many ways over the years. Marty Hipsky, Jackie Murray, Jason Nethercut all read chapters; David Armstrong did so over and over again; and Richard Janko continued to do so even after he had finished his duty as my supervisor. Richard Sammartino helped read the proofs.
Lee Fratantuono and Don Lateiner (quondam magistri, nunc conlegae), Mark Allison, Ellen Arnold, Amy Butcher, Erin Flynn, and Carol Neuman de Vegvar have been supportive friends and helpful interlocutors at the beginning of my career. As I begin a new phase of my career at the Universität zu Köln, I’d like to thank Prof. Jürgen Hammerstaedt and the Institut für Altertumskunde for hosting me and the staff of the Bibliothek des Instituts for their help in difficult circumstances.
I regret that the ongoing pandemic made it difficult for me to access books and articles during the final phases of this project. I hope the slips are not too bad.
“Last but not least” is my family—parents Liz and Paul, sister Emily, grandparents Bob and Judy and Don and Jean, cousins galore—who have supported me through everything. Molly McOsker remains δῖα γυναικῶν. The dissertation was dedicated to my grandmother Leota Lyne (Brower) McOsker (* 9 May 1929 Alva, Oklahoma, † 10 Dec. 2009 Cincinnati, Ohio). Now the book is dedicated to my parents.
Abbreviations
CA Collectanea Alexandrina, J. U. Powell, Oxford 1925
CErc Cronache ercolanesi
FHG Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, K. Müller, Paris 1828
GE Glossario epicureo, H. Usener, eds. M. Gigante and W. Schmid, Rome 1980
KD Kyriae Doxai
L.A. Φιλοδήμου Περὶ Ῥητορικῆϲ libros primum et secundum, F. Longo Auricchio, Naples 1977
SH Supplementum Hellenisticum, H. Lloyd-Jones and P. J. Parsons, Berlin 1983
SVF Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, H. von Armin, Stuttgart 1903
Us. Epicurea, H. Usener, Leipzig 1887
VS Vaticanae Sententiae
Philodemus and His Prolēpsis of the Good Poem
§1 Introduction to Philodemus’ Works
Philodemus’ philosophical work ranges widely.1 He wrote an introductory or protreptic work, “[On Choices and Avoidances],”2 as well as more advanced treatises on ethics, which are either focused on doctrinal debates or on removing vices and replacing them with virtues. Here the ten-book series “On Vices and Their Corresponding Virtues” is the major work.3 He shows an interest in teaching, found in the On Anger and especially the On Frank Speech. He wrote on epistemology (the On Signs in multiple books4 and the [On Sensations]) and the history of philosophy (the Syntaxis mentioned by Diogenes Laertius at X.15, of which several books survive), and especially the Epicurean school (On Epicurus in at least two books and the “Pragmateiai”). Additionally, he wrote extensively on aesthetic topics: On Poems (five books), On Music (four books), and On Rhetoric (probably eight books). Of these, the On Poems will be my primary focus, but several other works will be discussed in the course of the investigation. The aesthetic works are not technical manuals, but are about beliefs and attitudes towards their topics. For example, among the issues under discussion in the fourth book of the On Music (dedicated mostly to refuting Diogenes of Babylon, an early Stoic) are the definition of music, which is conceived of separately from the lyrics of a song; the role of hearing in the experience of music; whether music is educational; and whether it adds to the experience of divine worship. Nowhere are instructions for writing music given, and it was not Philodemus’ intent to give them nor, as Delattre (2007: 11) points out, was that
1 See Asmis (1990a) for a broader view.
2 The square brackets indicate that the title is a restoration; it does not survive on the papyrus, but seems likely. We know that Philodemus wrote a book by this title and it describes the content accurately. It was edited most recently by Tsouna and Indelli and is sometimes called the “Comparetti Ethics” (or L’ etica Comparetti) because Domenico Comparetti was the first to edit it. In “Hiatus in Epicurean Authors” (2017), I strengthen the case for Philodemus’ authorship.
3 Tsouna (2007) explores Philodemus’ ethics at length.
4 PHerc. 1065, the work edited by De Lacy and De Lacy (19782) under the title “Philodemus: On Methods of Inference” turns out to be book III; Delattre successfully read the subscription and so we now know the title was On Signs and Sign-Inferences and that this was book III. Del Mastro (2014: 154–55) identifies PHerc. 671 as another book in the On Signs group.
Diogenes’ goal either.5 Similarly, the On Poems contains discussions of the effects of rhythm and meter, but no listing of meters nor any discussion of how to write metrically. Examples are used from time to time to illustrate practical or philosophical points, not as models for imitation or objects of study, like Simonides’ poem in Plato’s Protagoras was.
The On Rhetoric, of which a great deal survives,6 started from a discussion of the technicity of rhetoric directed against heterodox Epicureans, that is, the questions “What is rhetoric?” and “Is rhetoric as a whole a technē? If not, what parts of it are?”
Philodemus’ discussion of the question is very interesting from a methodological point of view, especially since he occasionally links poetics and rhetoric; hence this work will be discussed as well.7
Philodemus’ On Poems all but certainly consisted of five books, of which much survives (three books quite substantially and some remains of the other two).8 The work is a polemical refutation of other theoreticians of poetry and poetics. Philodemus proceeds by summarizing his opponents’ positions, then systematically refuting their arguments in a variety of ways. The larger organization of the work is not obvious; it is clearly not chronological, but probably thematic (I suggest a theory below). Opponents include the Kritikoi, also known as the euphonic theorists (Megaclides of Athens, Andromenides, Heracleodorus, and Pausimachus, as well as Crates of Mallos to a certain extent), who thought that good sound or good verbal composition was the sole or main criterion of good poetry. They come under attack in books I and II. Books III and IV are poorly preserved, but Aristotle’s lost dialogue On Poets (or related Peripatetic views) is apparently the object of part of the surviving section of book IV and the beginning of book V and Crates reappears in book III. Book V evidently contains a miscellany; opponents included Heraclides of Pontos, Crates again (on a different topic: meaning and its relationship to language), an anonymous Stoic (the Stoic formerly thought to be Aristo), Neoptolemus of Parium (the alleged source for Horace’s Ars Poetica), and brief doxographies collected by an unknown Philomelus and a Zeno (perhaps—but probably not—Zeno of Sidon, Philodemus’ teacher and head of the Garden in Athens).
Philodemus’ argumentative strategy is now reasonably well understood.9 It is clear enough from the reasonably complete reconstructed works that he first summarized the views of an opponent or opponents, then refuted them; there
5 See Delattre (2007: 1–20) for a summary of Diogenes’ views.
6 The ensemble has been variously reconstructed but it was probably complete in eight books. I–IV and VIII are firmly attested (books II–IV in multiple copies) and several additional books, probably VI and VII, survive. See also appendix §3.
7 It is interesting historically as well, since his debate is with heterodox Epicureans.
8 The initial reconstruction was laid out in Janko (1991) and see also (1995); it has been continuously updated. See the introductions to the various editions for specific details.
9 The briefest introduction to Philodemus’ argumentative strategy is Neubecker (1983), who focuses on arguments in the On Music; more expansive is Delattre (1996) on the On Music as well as the On Signs and Sign-Inference. He discusses the organization of the whole book with special
may have been a transitional passage, perhaps a résumé to help the memory, between them. Sometimes, he (re-)reports the views of his opponent at length during the part of the treatise otherwise dedicated to refutation.10 It is safe to assume that the opponent and his treatise were clearly identified at the beginning of the summary; however, no such indication survives. In his refutations, he commonly accuses opponents of inconsistency, lack of specificity, making errors of fact or logic, as well as misunderstanding or misrepresenting real phenomena. Furthermore, he makes some objections based on Epicurean standards. Once he has refuted one part of an opponent’s argument, further aspects which depend on that first part may also come in for mockery. Jokes, polemical overstatement (perhaps for comic effect), and sarcasm are all common. Nowhere is there a trace of the modern “principle of charity,” except in discussions of earlier Epicureans, who could write no wrong. Further, for Philodemus, because of the Epicurean doctrine of prolēpsis, the statement “this is simply not what people mean when they say X,” if true, is a compelling refutation of any argument or assertion, since it reveals that the opponent is confused or discussing something imaginary or off-topic.
Generally, there is a very brief conclusion at the end of each book; these are usually less than a single column in length. It is absent when the discussion continues across the book boundary. In some cases, it clearly signals a transition to the next topic (e.g., On Signs and Sign-Inferences III, which signals the transition to a discussion of the Empirical school of physicians, presumably the topic of the lost book IV); in others, Philodemus might include a brief mopping up of a related topic (like at the ends of Music IV and Poems V). That brief refutation then serves as the conclusion of the whole ensemble (e.g., On Music IV and On Poems V).
§2 The Structure and Content of the On Poems
In 1955, Nathan Greenberg put forward a very tentative reconstruction of the work, which turns out to be correct in many particulars: specifically, book II is concerned with the euphonists, book IV with a criticism of Aristotelian theories of genre (in part), and V with the division between form and content and with the judgment of poems.11 His survey was vitiated by incomplete information, but it was remarkably perceptive, especially given the terrible state of the editions
attention to matters of punctuation and sign-posting in the text. Discussions of the structures of individual works can generally be found in the introductions to their editions.
10 I owe this observation to David Blank.
11 Greenberg (1990: 269–70). See also Janko (2011: 228–29).
at that point (books I and III were basically unknown to him, and II was not yet continuously legible).
Here is a brief summary of the structure:
• Books I and II are concerned with euphony, specifically the euphonies of letter, word, phrase, and metrical line. That they come as a pair and their order are guaranteed by the fact that a group of thinkers, summarized in book I, is refuted in the same order, and this refutation continues throughout book II. Philodemus’ back-reference at V.29.7–23 notes that he treated a topic in book II
, which I take to mean “since it is about verse generally,” or in other words primarily phonic qualities of verse.12 That back-reference secures the book numbers. Book II ends abruptly, and its discussion must have continued into the lost beginning of book III.
• Book III appears to be about the relationship between euphony and sense, and about poetic and prosaic words. Its number is assigned by process of elimination.
• Book IV is about genre, and the discussion of Aristotle’s views on the matter seems to continue into book V. The book number survives on a disegno.
• Book V is mostly about how poetry works and the judgment of poems; it ends with brief rebuttals of poorly thought-out positions and a single, exhausted sentence by way of conclusion: “As for the rest, you can easily figure out how they erred from what we’ve already said.” Its book number survives on both papyri that contain the end of the work.13
A movement from small to large, or most detailed to most global, is easily discernible. Books I and II are not about “poems generally” as Greenberg thought, but “verses” generally, and in a limited sense: verses treated as primarily sonic phenomena rather than carriers of meaning. Book III moves towards the larger concerns of book IV but still has connections with the discussions of euphony in the earlier section. Sadly, this book is the worst preserved and it is difficult to draw secure conclusions. Book IV leaves individual verses behind entirely and discusses the classification of poems into genre as well as the ranking and qualities of genres. Book V leaves even these divisions behind and discusses poems and poetry as general categories. This organization has the benefit of explaining the double discussion of Crates of Mallos, whose doctrines about the euphonic qualities of individual letters are refuted in book II, whereas his interpretation of poems
12 Jensen translates “weil dieses [sc. das zweite Buch] auch über das Gedicht im allgemeinen handelt” and Porter (1989: 161 with n. 67) translates “since it [our treatise] is a general work on poems.” πόηµα usually seems to me to mean simply “poem,” though often “verse” is a better translation. As mentioned in chapter 2 §3c, Heracleodorus gives it a specialized technical sense.
13 It may be accidental that the topics of a book so often spill over into the next one, but this would guarantee that they were read in the correct order.
is refuted in book V. Therefore, On Poems, as a title, is an accurate description of the content (On Verses would serve well as a title of books I–III). However, the extensive damage to the beginnings of the books and the generally poor state of III and IV make it impossible to be certain about this topical organizational scheme. Interestingly, few of Philodemus’ opponents in the On Poems are other philosophers. (I do not think that Crates of Mallos was a Stoic, though he did use some Stoic terminology.14) Other Kritikoi used Peripatetic terminology, but it is likewise not clear that this means that they were Peripatetics. Aristotle is handled in book IV where the distinctive doctrine of catharsis is discussed, perhaps as a particular feature of tragedy, Heraclides of Pontus in book V, and the anonymous Stoic also in book V, but the majority of the opponents are not identifiably philosophers. It is clear that the various schools had established opinions about poetry (and music and rhetoric), so it is somewhat mystifying that Philodemus does not discuss Plato at all and that Stoics get so little attention. I will suggest later that Philodemus is mopping up opinions that were not handled by other members of the school, i.e. Metrodorus, Zeno of Sidon, or Demetrius Laco. If I am correct about that, they would have handled most of the opinions of earlier philosophers.15 We do not know why Philodemus did not discuss contemporaries, nor why he did not discuss those poets who had put forwards views about poetry and poetics in their works, such as Callimachus. An explanation for the latter may be found in Philodemus’ opinion that poetry is an inappropriate medium for teaching because of its lack of clarity. Another possibility is this: declarations about poetics in poetry tend to be about particulars of style or genre, and genre was certainly not a major concern for Philodemus. Style was more important, but he connected it closely to content, and so he would consider futile a discussion of style without reference to content.
§3 Background and Method of This Study
Philodemus’ texts, like all the Herculaneum papyri, are in pretty disastrous shape. Almost all the primary sources I use were carbonized in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 ce. After they were found and unearthed in 1752–54, they were cut up in various ways and stored without care for keeping related pieces together. The papyri themselves range from medium brown to black in color and can be excruciatingly difficult to read; they are also very fragile. The outer
14 Broggiato, the editor of his fragments, considers him one, but I share Barnes’ (2005) hesitations about the evidence.
15 Metrodorus could have discussed Plato and earlier theorists, as we know that Colotes did at least incidentally, and Zeno’s book’s title (probably On the Utility of Poems) indicates a narrower thematic focus than we find in Philodemus.
portions of rolls were usually cut off and destroyed after being sketched. These sketches are called disegni and are often our only record of the texts that they contain. Disegni were also made of the surviving inner portions of rolls, and these can contain important information when the papyrus was damaged after the sketches were made.
No surprise then that good editions are hard to come by, and that the best ones have only appeared after a number of technical innovations improved our ability simply to read the papyri. Good binocular microscopes with LED lights are now fundamental to any work on the texts, as are the infrared photographs pioneered by a team from Brigham Young University in 1999. As these technologies improve, so does our ability to read the papyri. Three teams of computer scientists, physicists, and philologists are pioneering techniques to scan and unroll digitally the untouched rolls. Brent Seales was able to do just that with a carbonized roll of Leviticus found in Ein Gedi in Israel, and Herculaneum’s day may be coming soon.
Being able to read the papyri is useful; also useful is knowing what order the fragments on disegni go in. Daniel Delattre and Dirk Obbink reverse engineered the destructive method of opening and sketching the papyri that was used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and their method allows us to put fragments in order with a good deal of confidence. The disegnatore drew the inside layers of the rolls first, then scraped out the visible layer and drew the next layer. They numbered their fragments as they worked, which means that the numerations are the reverse of the real order of the fragments. Further, each series of disegni needs to be interleaved with another one (again in reverse order). Only in this way can the text be restored to its original order.
Additionally, work by Holger Essler, Francesca Longo Auricchio, and David Blank in the archives of the Biblioteca nazionale di Napoli and the Museo archeologico has brought to light early inventories and details about the storage and order of the papyri which allow us to group together fragments that originally belonged to the same roll but were separated over the course of time. Study of the paleography, pioneered by Guglielmo Cavallo, has also been crucial to sorting the papyri into some semblance of order.
An edition of a Herculaneum papyrus is always partial, in the sense that some fraction, usually obnoxiously large, of the text was destroyed by a volcano or cut up by the first generation of scholars or lies unrecognized in the drawers of the—to me, ironically named—Sezione papiri in the Naples library. The project of identifying all the pieces of one roll, restoring their original order, correctly reading and transcribing the text on the papyrus, then editing it, filling its lacunae, translating, and interpreting it is monstrously difficult, and few people have the preparation even to try it. The first editions, like those by Gomperz and Heidmann, were excellent treatments of some sections. The midollo of book V on the On Poems was well edited by Christian Jensen in 1923, book IV by Richard Janko in 1991, and
book V again by Mangoni in 1993. She also edited many of the fragments from the beginning of the roll, though they still have not been restored to their original order. Books I and III received their first editions in 2000 and 2011. As I write these words, book II has only now been fully published. The editorial situation, which was downright bad for most of the history of scholarship on the texts, is the main reason that few secure, lasting results have been achieved.
Nathan Greenberg’s 1955 Harvard dissertation, directed by Werner Jaeger, should have been the headwater of much productive work, but unfortunately it remained unpublished for a long time.16 It finally appeared in the 1990s, but only in a difficult-to-track-down dissertation series. He was one of the first to focus primarily on Philodemus’ own views, which he pieced together by a systematic, passage-by-passage analysis of the texts available to him. This basic procedure has remained standard: a passage is given with translation and philological notes, then analysis, then on to the next with its translation and philological notes, and so on. Brick by brick, an argument emerges. With texts as recalcitrant as these, this is the only way to get reliable conclusions, and it has been followed by most scholars of the On Poems.
The difficulty of reconstructing Philodemus’ views has several causes. The first is the state of the papyrus rolls; simply reading his sentences is difficult. Compounded with this is the fact that Philodemus apparently summarized his opponents’ views at the beginning—the most heavily damaged part of the roll— then criticized them, which means we usually only have the criticisms rather than the initial statements of doctrine.17 In order to infer Philodemus’ view, we first have to reconstruct his opponent’s view, or at least know why Philodemus objected to it, but this task is made harder because of the state of the rolls. The larger argumentative context must be kept in view at all times. Many good scholars have mistaken an opponent’s view for Philodemus’ or taken a conditional sentence as a statement of doctrine or a dialectical concession for a real one. And all that assumes that the text is securely established in the first place—many are the times when apparently solid arguments have been edited out from under their authors. Another cause is that, in many of his treatises, including the On Poems, he seems
16 His judgment was sober and good, and he was aware that the texts could only be pressed so far. He translated all the texts he used, which amounts, inter alia, to nearly a complete translation of book V, and which should by rights have rendered the material more accessible. Unfortunately, his dissertation languished unpublished, nearly unread outside specialist circles (G.M.E. Grube is an important exception), and it was not able to exert the influence it ought to have. A good deal of duplicate work appeared in the meanwhile, and many misunderstandings could have been avoided. His dissertation bore two spin-off articles: Greenberg on metathesis in Greek literary criticism (1958) and on Neoptolemus’ use of the terms poēma and poēsis (1961). His dissertation was summarized in the unsigned “Summaries of Dissertations for the Degree of Ph. D. 1954 and 1955” published in HSCP in 1957.
17 “Section” is a loose term here: book I of the On Poems mostly summarizes the opponents’ material, which is then rebutted at the end of book I and in book II and part of book III, but book IV of the On Music begins with the opponents’ doctrines and then Philodemus rebuts them in the same book (books I–III are not extant, so we do not know how they were arranged). It is also not certain that Philodemus always included statements of his opponents’ views.
to assume that his audience already knows his positions and does not need to be told them again. There is no lengthy, connected statement of Philodemus’ own views about poetry in his On Poems, and not many places where it could have been (the beginnings of books III and IV are the only ones, and those are not exactly obvious candidates). This is due, at least in part, to the nature of the work: it is a sort of critical “anticommentary,” in which opponents’ views are systematically demolished. Origin’s Against Celsus is probably the best known anticommentary; Plutarch’s Against Colotes is another example. A third reason is that Philodemus’ own formulations are often subject to his own criticisms: he is not as clear or explicit or unambiguous as he demands his opponents be. I suspect that this is because he has a sympathetic audience of Epicureans who can fill in the gaps for themselves from their own knowledge of doctrine.
An understanding of these earlier Epicureans is important for contextualizing Philodemus’ statements and appreciating his treatise. He did not work in a vacuum but relied on his audience’s knowledge of basic school doctrines about poetry and its role in the good life. These doctrines were, so far as we can tell, developed in the early years of the school, in the first generation or two. Metrodorus, Epicurus’ second-in-command, wrote an On Poems in at least two books, and Colotes handled some related topics in his polemics against Plato. Epicureans of the generation before Philodemus, Zeno of Sidon and Demetrius Laco, wrote treatises On the Utility of Poems and On Poems respectively. These works then formed part of the established body of material that serious students of Epicureanism studied. I trace these materials in as much detail as possible in chapter 1.
Similarly, a knowledge of Philodemus’ contemporary intellectual context enables us better to evaluate what is at stake in a given argument. The Hellenistic period was full of scholarly foment, especially in the field of poetics, and Philodemus contends with views about poetry that discount everything except formal features as well as views that find in early poets almost supernaturally gifted and discerning observers of the world, who were able to grasp geographical truths or Stoic doctrine hundreds of years before others. Many of these critics and philosophers are known only or mainly from Philodemus, which causes a great deal of trouble to the reader who tries to disentangle Crates or Pausimachus from Philodemus. When earlier scholars reached mistaken conclusions about Philodemus’ views, the cause was usually a bad reading of the papyrus. When it wasn’t, it was because they mistook someone else’s view for Philodemus. I give summaries of what we know about Philodemus’ opponents in chapter 2.
§4 Conclusions
It is a little unusual to have a section in one’s introduction about the conclusions of the work, but I felt that knowledge of the light at the end of the tunnel might
encourage more people to travel through it. This section is of course a summary; readers will find the texts and arguments which support it (I hope) throughout the book.
I want to say at the outset that Philodemus did have an account of poetry and its workings, which can be partially (perhaps mostly) recovered from a careful reading of the remains of his works. He does not develop this theory himself, at least in any of his extant works, and he probably took it over from an earlier Epicurean (Metrodorus, as I suggest in chap. 1 §§ 3 and 9). Since we cannot now identify that Epicurean with certainty, but we do know that Philodemus held this theory, I persist in calling it “Philodemus’ theory.”
In chapter 1, I summarize what we know about the Epicurean school’s discussions of poetry and poetics. It emerges that Epicurus and other firstgeneration Epicureans had developed views on many questions about poetry, including its status as a technē, what role it is to fill in society, and probably how it works. These were probably found mainly in Metrodorus’ On Poems.
In chapter 2, I summarize the views of Philodemus’ opponents in his On Poems (one of whom reappears in the On Music). This material provides context for Philodemus’ views—it is what he argues against. One of the major difficulties of dealing with Philodemus is unentangling his and his opponents’ views, so it seems worth the trouble to summarize what we know of them.
In chapter 3, I examine Philodemus’ arguments that poētikē is a technē, though not much of one, in the sense that it does not have many rules (i.e., probably, it is not very complicated to learn or use). Though the Epicureans usually thought (apparently) that the technai were useful, poetry and music are exceptions. Poetry—that is, poetic form—is not useful, but poems can be used by sages as storehouses of examples, as Epicurus did with Menander’s Georgos and Philodemus did with Homer. In these cases, the lessons are ethical. Didactic poetry is ruled out for a variety of reasons: poetry is not a suitable medium for teaching, which requires precision and flexibility of form that the strictures of meter and poetic diction do not allow. Poetry need not be useful to be good, and in fact it is not useful, qua poetry (chap. 3 §§4–5)
The meat of the book is in chapters 4 and 5. Philodemus’ main critical insight is that form and content influence each other mutually: a change in form is ipso facto a change in the contents of the poem and vice versa (chap. 4 §§3–4). This is because content underlies form and is prior to it. Additionally, words and meanings cannot really be treated apart from each other, though it may be convenient to do this from time to time in theoretical discussions (chap. 4 §2).
After a defense of the idea that Philodemus has identifiable goals for form and content (chap. 4 § 3–4), I examine his positions on each of these individually. For contents (chap. 4 §5), he wants something generally middle of the road, not usually philosophical or vulgar topics, but material suitable for an intelligent audience. Some elevated or base material is acceptable on appropriate occasions.
