Polyvalence by Design: Anticipated Audience in Hellenistic and Augustan Poetry

As I will show in this talk, Phaedrus – a freedman of Augustus who wrote a collection of fables in Latin verse in the early first century CE – took advantage of the polyvalent nature of the fable genre to create a text that appeals to elite audiences while simultaneously containing a subtext that challenges elite discourse. Fables, as many scholars have noted, are an inherently ambiguous genre: they are open-ended stories that can interpreted in various ways, depending on their context.

This paper considers the readership of Roman elegy in light of the evidence from Pompeian graffiti. The intertextual resonances of elegy with more popular forms of entertainment have been explored in a number of instances, most notably in Propertius’ fourth book (e.g. Knox 2004), which suggests a path of transmission from popular culture to the more elevated literary form. It may also be possible to retrace that path in order to draw some inferences about the response of readers outside the literary elite to the neoteric poets and the elegists of the Augustan period.

This paper argues that Lucretius combines many different genres in his initial characterization of Epicurus in an attempt to make his philosophical system accessible to as broad an audience as possible. Scholars have long recognized that Lucretius presents Epicurus in the De Rerum Natura as if he were an epic hero (e.g. Conte, Hardie, and Gale). This paper adduces further, polygeneric, intertextual appropriations in the introduction of Epicurus (DRN 1.62-79) that cumulatively complicate this epic characterization.

For more than two decades, reading approaches to Roman Love Elegy have now presupposed an exclusive, well-educated audience that engages with the genre's indirect political discourse (e.g., Kennedy 1993, Fredrick 1997, Miller 2004). Yet a look at a Pompeian graffito such as CIL 4.1520 (candida me docuit nigras odisse puellas / odero, si potero, sed non inuitus amabo) raises our awareness of the limited and limiting nature of current scholarship's perspective on this genre.

Near the end of his final book of exile poetry, Ovid presents two poems focused on his literary interaction with the local residents of Tomis. In both pieces he constructs scenarios in which the Tomitans become his unintended audience. Ex Ponto 4.13 and 4.14 form a complementary set, a diptych of opposites. This paper will examine the juxtaposition of these poems, their interaction, and their effect on Ovid’s exilic self-presentation. Ex Ponto 4.13 presents the poet as having learned the local lingo of Tomis and not only written but publicly declaimed a work in that language.