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On 24 Nov 2000, at 14:59, David Wilson-Okamura wrote: > Quite. The one thorough-going attempt to write a modern _Iliad_ was > Trissino's _Italia liberata dai Gotti_.* It was, by most accounts, a > spectacular failure. Tasso and Cinzio disagree about a lot of things, but > Trissino's epic is not one of them: this is a _bad_ poem. What's surprising > to me is that neither critic associates Trissino's badness with his > allegiance to Homer. According to Tasso and Cinzio, the problem with > Trissino is not that he is crude (a Homeric failing), but that his > classicism leaves us cold (a Virgilian failing; see, for instance, book 3 > of Tasso's _Discorsi dell'arte poetica_ on _il magnifico_ and _il freddo_). I'm curious about the meaning of "crude" as it's applied to Homer. Is he crude in meter, diction, characterization, imagery, dialogue, narrative or psychology? Certainly the oral formulaic style is not in itself crude. I'd equally like to know where Vergil is "cold" outside the unfinished sections of the Aeneid. > No. Insofar as the poet is talking about the well of English, Spenser is to > Chaucer as Virgil was, not to Homer, but to Ennius, the Old Latin chronicle > poet. Cf. Du Bellay on Virgil and Cicero in _Deffence et illustration_ 1.7 > et passim. It is not quite correct to say that Vergil stood to Ennius as Spenser to Chaucer. Vergil set out to replace, not continue, Ennius. The ancient grammarians make it clear that the purpose of the Aeneid was to imitate Homer and praise Augustus starting with his ancestors. That may a slight simplification, but the Aeneid could have existed without Ennius given dactylic hexameter. His intention at replacement worked. Ennius and the other Republican epic poets ceased to be read and copied, thus leading to their complete or nearly complete loss. From the 1st century CE Vergil was the supreme Latin poet and, until the 19th century, when German Hellenic studies elevated Greece over Rome as our primary cultural ancestor, the supreme Classical poet. > Yes. Chaucer is crude but good (like Homer). Ennius is just crude. This is extremely unfair to the little we have of Ennius. He was an experimental poet who had a profound effect on language, style and meter. Although his hexameters do not the finish of Catullus, Vergil or Ovid, it is only a comparative roughness. They had a much longer history of craftsmanship behind them. It was Ennius' yoking of the native Latin alliterative style to the hexameter that made him seem so archaic. The regular use of alliteration inside the dactylic hexameter gave it, to later ears, a heavy and monotonous tread. When Vergil employs alliteration, he does so precisely to give his verse an antique feel, the ring of the ancient. Steven J. Willett University of Shizuoka, Hamamatsu Campus 2-3 Nunohashi 3-chome Hamamatsu City, Japan 432-8012 Voice and Fax: (53) 457-4514 Japan email: [log in to unmask] US email: [log in to unmask] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%