Freedom and Servitude in the Augustan Elegy

Gaius Valerius Catullus’ polymetric and elegiac poems make up two thirds of a body of work which expresses the poetic and psychological imagination of the finest poetae novi to emerge from that school. His stylistically refined and genre-defying verse, which Cicero famously found distasteful to his own restrained and traditional tastes, yet belies a psychological tension between the old and the new. Simultaneously both eschewing and honouring the conventions of Roman values and literary propriety, Catullus’ oeuvre is metrically diverse, linguistically adventurous, and rich in allusion. His polymetric poems and his elegiac verse both speak of the conflicts within himself, and his attempts to redefine and re-purpose the role of poet in the society in which he lived.

Exemplaria classica: journal of classical philology, 2017

2014

This is the first book to study the impact of invective poetics associated with early Greek iambic poetry on Roman imperial authors and audiences. It demonstrates how authors as varied as Ovid and Gregory Nazianzen wove recognizable elements of the iambic tradition (e.g., meter, motifs, or poetic biographies) into other literary forms (e.g., elegy, oratorical prose, anthologies of fables), and it shows that the humorous, scurrilous, efficacious aggression of Archilochus continued to facilitate negotiations of power and social relations long after Horace's Epodes. The eclectic approach encompasses Greek and Latin, prose and poetry, and exploratory interludes appended to each chapter help to open four centuries of later classical literature to wider debates about the function, propriety, and value of the lowest and most debated poetic form from archaic Greece. Each chapter presents a unique variation on how each of these imperial authors became Archilochushowever briefly and to whatever end. tom hawkins is Associate Professor of Classics at Ohio State University. His work and teaching focus on iambic poetics and invective as well as animal studies and personhood.

2018

Antichthon, 2023

Within the rhetorical frameworks of exhortation and illustrative exemplum, Horace's second and sixth Roman Odes offer compressed, contrasting images of a young person's education and transformation, presenting these as stories about a puer and a virgo, respectively, in a lyric mode that does not narrate. In the first of these stories (Carm. 3.2.1-12), Horace slyly usurps characters from Vergil's unfinished Aeneid, alluding to some of its distinctive narrative techniques, but also draws on the similes and plot structure of its Iliadic model. The second of Horace's stories (Carm. 3.6.21-32) plays off his first, as he converts the adulta virgo who figures in Carm. 3.2 into her antitype. This story has as its intertext an obscene Hellenistic epigram by Automedon. Horace makes both intertextual and metatextual use of his models, while his indirect references, through Homer, to Vergil's intended design for his emerging Aeneid may be considered under the new heading of extratextual.

Signal::Failure (squared) - The Agon of Romance and Triumph, 2015

Catalogue essay for the exhibition 'Signal::Failure (squared) - The Agon of Romance and Triumph'. Maverick Projects, Safehouses 1 and 2, London, December 2015.

Antichthon

Within the rhetorical frameworks of exhortation and illustrative exemplum, Horace's second and sixth Roman Odes offer compressed, contrasting images of a young person's education and transformation, presenting these as stories about a puer and a virgo, respectively, in a lyric mode that does not narrate. In the first of these stories (Carm. 3.2.1–12), Horace slyly usurps characters from Vergil's unfinished Aeneid, alluding to some of its distinctive narrative techniques, but also draws on the similes and plot structure of its Iliadic model. The second of Horace's stories (Carm. 3.6.21–32) plays off his first, as he converts the adulta virgo who figures in Carm. 3.2 into her antitype. This story has as its intertext an obscene Hellenistic epigram by Automedon. Horace makes both intertextual and metatextual use of his models, while his indirect references, through Homer, to Vergil's intended design for his emerging Aeneid may be considered under the new heading of ...

New approaches to the Age of Augustus on the bimillennium of his death I, 2020

Por más que pueda parecer una doble contradictio in terminis hablar de poesía helenística en el Siglo de Augusto y de valores metapoéticos en una obra escrita en prosa, el autor de este capítulo propone un análisis de los Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα de Partenio de Nicea (uno de los ejemplos más granados de obra-puente entre la poesía del período helenístico y la gran poesía latina de época augústea) desde unos presupuestos metapoéticos y esclarecedores del quehacer poético los siglos alejandrinos y su recepción en el mundo romano. Although it may seem a double contradictio in terminis to speak about Hellenistic Poetry in the Age of Augustus and about metapoetic values in a work written in prose, the author of this chapter proposes an analysis of the Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα of Parthenius of Nicaea (one of the more illuminating examples of a work bridging the poetry of the Hellenistic period and the great Latin poetry of the Augustan Age) from a metapoetic perspective that sheds light on the Alexandrian poetic practice and its reception in the Roman world.