The Glorious Twelfth

“That there was an art of making statues established in Italy also, and from an early date, is indicated by the Hercules dedicated in the Forum Boarium (Cattle Market), so they say, by Evander, who is called the triumphal Hercules and is dressed in triumphal clothes when triumphs are being celebrated; and also by the statue of Twin-faced Janus dedicated by king Numa, who is worshipped as presiding over peace and war, with his fingers so arranged as to indicate, by the sign of three hundred and sixty-five days, that he is also the god of time.”

A paragraph from Pliny the Elder (Hist. Nat. 34.33) which caught my attention a few months ago. There’s nothing original in what follows, but I’m thinking, on and off, about Hercules (Heracles, Verethragna, Vajrapani…), and this clarified some things for me about Hercules in Rome. There is no reason on Earth why my noodlings should be of any interest to you, needless to say.

Specifically, I was thinking, as I often do, about Hercules in Virgil’s Aeneid.

In Book VIII of Virgil’s epic Aeneas visits the future site of Rome, and is welcomed and entertained by the Greek king Evander, the alleged dedicator (Pliny is clearly sceptical) of that statue, who has settled there. Evander’s son Pallas will be crucial to the rest of the plot, his death at the hands of Turnus motivating Aeneas’ culminating revenge. But a lengthy section of this book is taken up by Evander’s account to Aeneas of Hercules’ exploits at Rome, how he had visited the site as he was herding the cattle of Geryon from Spain back to Argos, his tenth Labour, and slain a monstrous bandit called Cacus who was terrorizing Evander’s people.

Hercules is worshipped as a god by Evander (he has in the interim died and been deified), and it turns out that Aeneas has arrived on the very day of the festival of Hercules, suggesting a parallel between Aeneas and Hercules that Virgil periodically activates in the course of the poem. This festival, celebrated in Virgil’s day at the Ara Maxima, the shrine of Hercules in the Forum Boarium, fell on August 12, and that date opens up an entirely different dimension of significance.

Book VIII will end with the scene of Augustus’ Triple Triumph in 29 B.C., as represented by Vulcan on the shield he has forged for Aeneas. The triumph was a spectacular procession of troops, captives and spoils through Rome, staged by a successful Roman general, himself dressed in impressive clothing and riding in a chariot. In 29 Augustus celebrated triumphs, for military victories in Dalmatia and then over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium and in Egypt, on three consecutive days, August 13, 14 and 15. Augustus thus formally arrived at Rome, in preparation for these processions, on the day that Aeneas first comes to Rome, according to Virgil, but also the day on which Hercules had rid the city of the scourge of Cacus, and on which his delivery of Rome was to be celebrated thereafter. Denis Feeney (Caesar’s Calendar p.162) calls this a kind of wormhole, times widely separated, in the case of Hercules or Aeneas and Augustus by a thousand years, but identified in Roman minds by the sanctity of the day. It’s clear enough that Augustus had timetabled his triumphs so as to associate himself with Hercules in his role as Rome’s saviour, and that Virgil is elaborating on that.

What Pliny’s information about the statue of Hercules gives us is further reason for Augustus to align his own arrival in Rome with Hercules’s. What we learn from that “Triumphal Hercules” at the Ara Maxima, supposedly dedicated by Evander himself, and dressed up in the same elaborate clothing as a triumphing general during his triumph, is that Hercules could be understood to be the original triumphator, the model for every triumphing general, and that Augustus was in this respect as well something like a reincarnation of Hercules as he processed through the streets of Rome in 29 B.C.

Alba Fucens

As I say, there’s nothing remotely new about any of these observations. Here, for example, is Matthew Loar batting around similar ideas in greater depth and with much greater sophistication. What follows, furthermore, is provoked by a rereading on my part of Mary Beard’s The Roman Triumph, and some hints there of the depth of the connections Romans came to perceive, and Virgil was able to exploit, between Hercules and the triumph. It seems clear, at any rate, or at least clearer to me than it used to, that the very name of Hercules could evoke the triumphal ceremony. Horace in one of his Odes, 3.14, welcomes Augustus returning from campaign in Spain “in the manner of Hercules”, Herculis ritu, suggesting the Hercules who had also come to Rome from that direction, but also bestowing on Augustus’ arrival something of the character of a triumph.

What Mary’s book made me think of more, though, was food. There is a persistent association, albeit hard to pin down in detail, between Hercules, the triumph, and feasting. Athenaeus, citing the Stoic philosopher Posidonius, a visitor to Rome in the first century B.C., describes a feast at Hercules’s shrine (presumably the Ara Maxima), laid on by the triumphing general, the generosity of which, Posidonius remarked, was itself “Heraclean” in the provision of wine and food (Deipnosophistae 4, 153c; cf. 5, 221f). There seems to be some connection here to a ritual described by Plutarch (Roman Questions 18) whereby wealthy men would gift 10% of their wealth to Hercules at the Ara Maxima by throwing a massive dinner for Roman male citizens (women were forbidden access to the Ara Maxima).


Plutarch on the Hercules tithe, courtesy of Lacus Curtius

Quite what the connecting threads were between the dinners at Hercules’ shrine and the triumphal dinners is elusive, but one thing all this emphasis on feasting illustrates is a fundamental, and fascinating, tension in the Greco-Roman perception of this, their greatest, hero. Hercules was a god-like bringer of peace and order, but Hercules was also an all-too-human and notorious carouser, according to Plutarch somehow both gluttonous (ἀδηφάγος) and frugal in his lifestyle (ἀπέριττος  τῷ βίῳ).

At the Ara Maxima in Rome he was all of these things, on the one hand one of Rome’s many founder figures (like Romulus, and Aeneas himself), and on the other the instigator of unrestrained self-indulgence. Propertius 4.9, which playfully continues Hercules’ story in Aeneid VIII after his conquest of Cacus, exploits this contrast to comic effect, depicting a Hercules ravenous with thirst after his exertions begging for entry to the shrine of the Bona Dea, a sanctuary that excluded men (just as his shrine excluded women). The statue in the photo above is from Alba Fucens in Central Italy (now in the Museo archeologico nazionale d’Abruzzo in Chieti), a cult of Hercules closely related to that in the Forum Boarium (involving a further dimension of Hercules, as a god of commerce, but that’s another story). He strikes a relaxed pose, wine cup in his left hand (perhaps the wooden scyphus that Servius at Aen. 8.278 tells us Hercules brought with him to Italy) and garland on his head.

It is with feasting at the Ara Maxima in honour of Hercules that the day ends in Aeneid 8, too, before Evander leads Aeneas through Rome-before-Rome to Evander’s simple hut on the Palatine hill. This feasting is seemingly as strong an allusion to triumphal ritual as anything else.

Was it a statue like the one from Alba Fucens, Hercules relaxed and tipsy, that was decked out in the elaborate gear of a triumphing general, I wonder? It would capture something essential about this culture hero if it was.

Genre, gender (& some genitalia)















When words collide

In Poem 84 Catullus has a go at a man named Arrius.

Arrius’ fault is to aspirate, add an initial aitch to, unaspirated Latin words, turning insidiae into hinsidiae and commoda into chommoda, the ch not as in church but (W. Sidney Allen’s example, Vox Latina p. 26) quite like the initial sound of cot. Catullus’ target may be Q. Arrius, a lower-class, self-made orator snootily dismissed by Cicero in his history of oratory at Brutus 242-3. There are other open questions about the poem (what the point of calling Arrius’ uncle “free” is, for example, and whether the joke in the last line is just that Arrius and his aitches are on their way home), but Catullus’ objection to Arrius’ hypercorrection no doubt carries an edge of disdain from the upper-class (and self-consciously sophisticated) poet toward a social inferior, someone socially as well as phonetically aspirational. Romans were terrible snobs, needless to say.

I’m interested in something more specific, though. Line 8, audibant eadem haec leniter et leuiter, describes the halcyon aural conditions that obtain when Arrius and his aitches have left the country; literally, “they (either everyone, or everyone’s ears) heard these same words smoothly and softly” in Arrius’ absence, leuiter hinting at the spiritus leuis or “soft breathing”, the symbol that indicates a lack of aspiration over an initial vowel in Greek (Quinn, Catullus, the poems, ad loc.). But what there also is in line 8 is an example of the meeting of two words in a poetic line generally known as elision, but more accurately as synaloepha (“melding”): the four syllables eadem haec become three, because -em and hae- coalesce into one.

Synaloepha is a common feature of Latin poetry, and it happens when a vowel or diphthong at the end of one word meets a vowel or diphthong at the start of the next. In this poem, for example, we see it in line 2, dicere, et (pronounced diceret), and 3, se esse (sesse). In most cases it was not strictly a matter of “elision”, a syllable being entirely lost, but some kind of combination of the two vowels or diphthongs into one–hence the preference for “synaloepha” as the term to describe it. Eadem haec, one word ending with -m, the next starting with h-, doesn’t at first sight look like it should be subject to the same process. But a vowel followed by m in Catullus’ Latin was pronounced as a nasalized long vowel, while the aspiration of h was so weakly realised, in elite Latin at least, that it was as if the word simply opened with the diphthong ae.

That said, how exactly the blending of eadem and haec would have sounded is hard to reconstruct: a nasalized contraction of long e and ae, maybe (W. Sidney Allen, Vox Latina p. 81), or (J. Soubiran, L’élision dans la poésie latine p. 132, supported by Quintilian, Inst. 9.4.40) something like ewae, the -em expressed by “rounding the lips as if to end with a -w” (A. Gratwick, Plautus, Menaechmi p. 251).

If that seems awkward, there are indications in the poetic use of this kind of synaloepha of -m, as Soubiran remarks, that it could be heard as an unpleasant sound: the textbook example (for ancients and moderns) is Virgil’s description of Polyphemus at Aeneid 3.658, monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens (monstruworrenduwinformingens), a splurge of sound that destroys the elegant fabric of the heroic hexameter and is clearly designed to convey the ugliness of the Cyclops. That doesn’t exhaust the expressive power of synaloepha of -m, though: a line in many ways similar to the Cyclops line, Aen. 9.170, describing Latinus’ palace, tectum augustum, ingens, centum sublime columnis (tectuwaugustuwingens), seems to suggest a building soaring beyond one’s ability to discern its structure, dissolving the structure of the hexameter for different effect, or so I once proposed (Musa pedestris p. 331). More persuasive is E.J. Kenney’s remark, in a review of Soubiran (CR 17 (1967), 325-8), that synaloepha can be “used, especially by Virgil, to produce an almost unlimited range of effects.” Elsewhere Catullus himself, at 17.26, ferream ut soleam tenaci in voragine mula, “as a mule [leaves] her iron shoe in the clinging mire”, “smears together” two normally separate elements of a composite verse to evoke, in tenacin, a horseshoe left stuck in the mud.

Returning to Catullus 84, what cannot assert itself in this encounter between eadem and haec is any aspiration of the h. The synaloepha in line 8 is tackled in a very acute reading of this poem by E. Vandiver (“Sound patterns in Catullus 84”, The Classical Journal 85 (1990), 337-40). Her suggestion is that it would have been pronounced eadhaec (a true elision of -em, in effect), and thus might evoke the aspirated consonants like ch that Arrius was in the habit of inflecting on everyone. In fact, though, as I’ve explained, that kind of elision of vowel + m isn’t generally considered the most likely account. But even if it were, an h with sufficient force to persist in this way wouldn’t admit synaloepha (by compromising the preceding vowel sound) at all.

So my suspicion is that something like the opposite is true. My polymathic colleague Jonathan Katz points out to me that unless Catullus is making a point about haec, there’s really no need to include this word at all. What is his point in introducing an h only to suppress it, then? Surely, rather than echoing Arrius’ crimes against good Latin, the line that describes a life (temporarily) free of Arrius’ aspirations is serving up an aitch pronounced as it should be pronounced, i.e. not pronounced at all.

For as long as Arrius is away, in other words, even when there’s an h on the page, no one ‘as to ‘ear it.

Swat II: on Heracles’ track to the Indus


















From that country we went to the west for seven days;
Up to the mountain Ilo, the peak of K’a rag k’ar
In the mountain, sarabhas play
And there are gardens of grape in abundance.
I did not covet any thing.”

















Read Swat I




Swat I: the Jahanabad Buddha












Read Swat II

Desperately seeking Sulpicia


Behold, traveller, the ashes of Sulpicia the reader,
to whom had been given the slave name Petale.
She had lived in number more than thirty-four years
She excelled in beauty. She had grown in talent.
their very distaff failed the Fates.









A lay-by in Bulgaria









Metamorphic metametricality


Any blogs from me will be short and sweet this summer, my writing schedule being what it is, and highly likely to be about Ovid for the same reason.

For this one, two assumptions are required: first, that Ovid is so very self-aware a poet that his narrative might at any moment enact his literary principles; and secondly that the metre of poetry in antiquity, and in Rome specifically, was meaningful in its own right.

I’m here concerned with the Metamorphoses, unusual among Ovid’s works for being composed in the dactylic hexameter, stereotypically the metre of epic, the highest form of poetry. The hexameter was known as the herous or ἡρωικός, the “heroic” metre, its very name implying it was intrinsically suited to tell the deeds of great men: I discussed an ancient response to the hexameter and its ethos, the sotadean metre, in another blog here. The Metamorphoses is ostensibly a heroic epic, as its metre and length and cast of heroes imply, but Ovid is throughout this poem superbly disrespectful of the sublime values an epic was supposed to embody.

Ovid’s inappropriate approach to writing epic has been noted, and deplored, ever since he wrote it, and a recurrent theme of the criticism of ancient figures like the Senecas Elder and Younger and Quintilian and more modern critics like John Dryden, as an article of mine argued many moons ago,* was that Ovid’s approach to writing epic, properly the task of a mature and serious sensibility, was mischievous–childish, to use a metaphor regularly found: Seneca the Younger chastises Ovid’s addiction to pueriles ineptiae, “childish silliness”, for example, and Dryden talks of the “boyisms” that mar the dignity of his epic poetry.

The main point of my article was to show, not just that Ovid was perfectly aware how far he was falling short of epic respectability in the Metamorphoses, but that Ovid took poetic self-awareness to an ever higher level, actually anticipating within his poem the criticisms that would be directed at it. At three points in particular, Cupid’s encounter with Apollo in Met. 1, Phaethon’s piloting of the sun chariot in Met. 2, and the famous story of Daedalus and Icarus in Met. 8, I suggested that these accounts could be read as “metaliterary drama”, vignettes programmatically encapsulating the deeper character of the poem. In each case, simply put, a heroic circumstance is disrupted by a child, Apollo transformed from the conqueror of Python into a plaintive lover, the horses of the sun careering out of control and scorching the earth under Phaethon’s inadequate control, and Daedalus’ momentous achievement of flight ruined by Icarus’ boyish refusal to obey instruction. Ovid was staging in his own narrative the childish subversion of epic values he would later himself be told off for.

It’s Icarus’ story that I want to bring back to metre. One metaliterary vignette, I’d suggest, is the scene from Met. 8 where Daedalus is meticulously constructing wings for himself and his son. Icarus does what children do, getting in the way (193-203, with the Miller Loeb translation, slightly adapted).

tum lino medias et ceris alligat imas
atque ita conpositas paruo curuamine flectit,
ut ueras imitetur aues. puer Icarus una                               195
stabat et, ignarus sua se tractare pericla,
ore renidenti modo, quas uaga mouerat aura,
captabat plumas, flauam modo pollice ceram
mollibat lusuque suo mirabile patris
impediebat opus. postquam manus ultima coepto              200
inposita est, geminas opifex librauit in alas
ipse suum corpus motaque pependit in aura.

Then Daedalus ties the feathers together with twine and wax at middle and bottom;
and, thus arranged, he bends them with a gentle curve
so that they look like real birds’ wings. His son Icarus
with smiling face now snatched at the feathers
which the shifting breeze had blown about, now moulded the yellow wax
with his thumb, and by his play hindered
his father’s wondrous task. When now the finishing touches
had been put to the work, the maestro himself balanced his body
on two wings and hung poised in the beaten air.

We all know how this story ends. What for me is typical of Ovid about this passage is how he paints a picture which is vividly true to life, the child chasing feathers and moulding the wax into shapes, but which at the same time works perfectly as a metaphor for the Metamorphoses as a whole, a poem that refuses to abide by the rules, a world where things never go for its heroic protagonists as they should. (Denis Feeney once explained to me why he liked Toy Story so much: “It’s just like the Metamorphoses: Buzz Lightyear thinks he’s a superhero, but in fact he’s just a toy.”)

But what about the metre?

Bear in mind that I’m currently thinking too much about Ovid, and I’ve been thinking too hard about metre for years. But just note how the boy Icarus enters and exits this scene, puer Icarus una… in 195 and impediebat opus in 200: in each case Icarus isn’t just disrupting Daedalus’ wondrous task, but interrupting the heroic measure, intervening halfway into the dactylic hexameter, departing halfway through.

Ovid’s intense self-consciousness undoubtedly extends to the metres he uses, we know that from elsewhere. And whether or not there is metrical self-awareness here, it is poetically effective to have Icarus butting in unexpectedly after the line has started. But I suspect that Ovid thinks of the metre of his poem, as much as any other element of it, as a conventional epic feature ripe for his mischievous attention, and wants us to appreciate it as such.

Here, I think, as heroic action is disrupted by this childish impulse, whether we call it Icarus’s or Ovid’s, so is heroic form.

*”Child’s play: Ovid and his critics,” Journal of Roman Studies 93 (2003), 66-91.

Incense and patchouli




Let’s start with Odes 2.7.




O saepe mecum tempus in ultimum
deducte Bruto militiae duce,
quis te redonauit Quiritem
dis patriis Italoque caelo,

Pompei, meorum prime sodalium,               5
cum quo morantem saepe diem mero
fregi, coronatus nitentis
malobathro Syrio capillos?

tecum Philippos et celerem fugam
sensi relicta non bene parmula,                    10
cum fracta uirtus et minaces
turpe solum tetigere mento;

sed me per hostis Mercurius celer
denso pauentem sustulit aere,
te rursus in bellum resorbens                    15
unda fretis tulit aestuosis.

ergo obligatam redde Ioui dapem
longaque fessum militia latus
depone sub lauru mea, nec
parce cadis tibi destinatis.                          20

obliuioso leuia Massico
ciboria exple, funde capacibus
unguenta de conchis. quis udo
deproperare apio coronas

curatue myrto? quem Venus arbitrum         25
dicet bibendi? non ego sanius
bacchabor Edonis: recepto
dulce mihi furere est amico.

You and I have often been led to the edge
of doom with Brutus in command,
and now who has made you a Roman again
and restored to your ancestral gods and Italian sky,

O Pompeius, first of my friends, with whom
I so often broke into the lagging day with neat wine,
head garlanded and hair sleek
with Syrian malobathrum?

With you I knew Philippi and speedy flight,
leaving my little shield behind, shame to say,
when virtue snapped and the chins
of blusterers touched the base earth.

I panicked, but swift Mercury carried me off
in a dense mist through the enemy ranks,
while a wave sucked you back into war
and swept you along in a boiling sea.

So pay to Jupiter the feast that was vowed,
lay down your body weary with campaigning
here under my laurel tree, and have no mercy
on the casks of wine I have reserved for you.

Fill up the polished Egyptian cups with Massic
for forgetfulness and pour fragrant oils from full shells.
Whose business is it to run
for garlands of moist celery

and myrtle? Whom will Venus choose as master
of the wine? l shall run wild as any Edonian
at her Bacchic orgies. My friend is back.
What joy to go mad!




The noblest of their sons













How terrifying a threat Carthage actually posed to Rome.


