We talked about this briefly several years ago, but something came up that made me think of it again, and I need help. Brooks Otis and, more recently, Wendell Clausen have emphasized Virgil's indebtedness to Hellenistic poetry and, beyond that, to what we might call the Hellenistic sensibility, by which I mean a liking for poetry that is (a) polished, (b) subjective, and (c) short. This is a useful set of ideas, but it's one, so far as I can tell, that the Renaissance just didn't have. Or rather, critics in the Renaissance had them separately, as ideas about form, but they didn't group those ideas chronologically; they weren't aware of the "Hellenistic sensibility" as an episode in the history of taste. They did have a sense that Ennius and Livius Andronicus come before Virgil, and that Ennius was crude. There's also a very keen sense of the difference between Tacitus and Cicero (not to mention classical and post-classical Latin). But not of movements and styles within the late Republic.
Am I wrong about this?* And if I'm not, when do scholars begin to talk about these things? Ideally, the answer would be in the form of an article citation. Pieces of the answer could probably be assembled from histories of classical scholarship (e.g., Sandys, Pfeiffer), but these are really capsule biographies; what I'm looking for is the history of an idea. * It's been a couple years since I looked at Julia Gaisser's _Catullus and His Renaissance Readers_. Will order it up on ILL and check. What I do recall is that Poliziano knows some of the sources for Catullus as texts. What eludes him still is the category. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina University Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
