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"Breed, Brian W"
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Pastoral Inscriptions
Virgil's represent the introduction of a new genre, pastoral, to Latin literature. Generic markers of pastoral in the Eclogues include not only the representation of the singing and speaking of shepherd characters, but also the learned density of the text itself. Here, Brian W. Breed examines the tension between representations of orality in Virgil's pastoral world and the intense textuality of his pastoral poetry. The book argues that separation between speakers and their language in the Eclogues is not merely pastoral preciosity. Rather, it shows how Virgil uses representations of orality as the point of comparison for measuring both the capacity and the limitations of the Eclogues as a written text that will be encountered by reading audiences. The importance of genre is considered both in terms of how pastoral might be defined for the particular literary-historical moment in which Virgil was writing and in light of the subsequent European pastoral tradition.
eBook
Tua, Caesar, Aetas: Horace Ode 4.15 and the Augustan Age
Horace Ode 4.15 names the Augustan Age, defining a bounded period of history by reference to Augustus' mortal lifespan (aetas). By contrast, poetry's command of immortality gives the poet, not the princeps, ultimate control of the meaning of aetas Augusta. But Horace undermines the suggestion that his own poetry will forever define and represent the Augustan Age. Ode 4.15 in fact projects the Aeneid, or a sanitized version of it, as the Roman people's everlasting hymn in praise of Augustus and his age. This gesture of demurral is anticipated in the poem's opening recusatio of a Virgilian-style epic.
Journal Article
Perugia and the plots of the Monobiblos
There is, alas, no secret code or mystical number lurking in the text of Propertius' first book of elegies which, if discovered, could reveal essential truths about the book. Or at least there is none that I can claim to have found. The search for some key to unlock secrets of meaning and authorial design is a well-known phenomenon of the interpretation of Roman poetry books, and Propertius' ‘single book’ has featured prominently in such investigations. The present paper does not put forth a new structural scheme for understanding the Monobiblos or another description of numerical patternings in it, nor does it insist that a true appreciation of the book's ‘architecture’ is essential for understanding its meaning. Instead, it has the goal of considering how the book format affects the experience of reading and the interpretation of this one important work of Roman poetry in light of its generic identity and the literary-historical context in which it was produced. In particular, I am interested in describing how the book format makes available to readers of the Monobiblos a sense that even in the absence of a single narrative spanning all of the poems of the book it is nevertheless possible to supplement them so that something like a plot or story emerges. I first consider how this sense of a possible plot or plots arises in the reading process, looking also at how some previous influential studies of the Monobiblos have relied upon various ways of construing a story or plot for the book.
Journal Article
Vergil’s Eclogues (Oxford Readings in Classical Studies)
Breed reviews Virgil's Eclogues by Katharina Volk.
Journal Article