Chapter 3 Lyric Poetry Victoria Moul 1. Defining Neo-Latin lyric The first obstacle encountered in any study of Neo-Latin lyric is one of terminology: in classical criticism, lyric poetry is strictly speaking poetry, whether Latin or Greek, written in the collection of meters designed for song accompanied by the lyre. The bulk of this ancient lyric is Greek, and Pindar (ca. 518–after 446 BC) the single most influential poet. The only major classical Latin author of lyric poetry is Horace (65–8 BC), though Catullus (ca. 84–after 54 BC) also wrote a handful of poems in Latin adaptions of the Greek lyric meters, plus some pieces in hendecasyllables and scazons that are often treated as lyric. Among later classical authors, the lyric choruses of Seneca (ca. 1–65 AD), and some Christian poets such as Prudentius (AD 348–after 405) have particularly influenced the Neo-Latin lyric tradition. Amongst all these writers, Sapphics and Alcaics are the most common stanza form, followed by the various types of Asclepiad meter. Epodic meters (used in Horace’s Epodes) and elegiac couplets (a dactylic hexameter followed by a pentameter) are not strictly lyric: that is, they are not originally designed for song. But both Horace’s Epodes and the Latin elegists treat themes typical of ancient Greek lyric, such as love, mythology and political praise. This blurred boundary between lyric and elegy is inherited by Neo-Latin poetry (Schmitz 1994, 173–75): authors may describe, for instance, a solemn poem written in elegiac couplets as an “ode”, and similarly we find pieces in lyric metres included in principally elegiac collections, as in the 1551 Elegiarum liber (“Book of elegies”) by Petrus Lotichius Secundus (1528-1560). A further strand of Neo-Latin lyric is introduced by the gradual conflation during the course of the Renaissance of classical lyric poetry – especially in its most high-flown and inspired forms, associated with the mythical poets Orpheus and Amphion – and the songs of the biblical psalms, attributed to King David. Countless Renaissance texts combine these elements when describing and situating their own lyric work: George Herbert’s (1593–1633) fine ode De musica sacra (“On Sacred Music”) is constructed around a series of first mythological and then scriptural references which form the spine of the poem and lead us from Deucalion (a perhaps surprising starting point, analysed in §5) to Orpheus, Amphion, the Graces, Moses and then the psalms of David. For the purposes of this volume, I have in general avoided lengthy discussion of dedicatory or descriptive verse keyed to specific occasions, as well as short poems upon named individuals, stock characters or moral qualities, which are most naturally considered epigrams (on these aspects of Renaissance Latin poetics, see Money, Chapter 5 in this volume). All the same, this is an essentially artificial distinction: Arthur Marotti’s magisterial study of English lyrics of the Renaissance makes “The Occasional Character of Renaissance Lyric Verse” his very first sub-heading (Marotti 1995, 2). Several of Horace’s grandest odes, especially from his fourth book, are keyed to imperial victories; and the epinician odes of Pindar, traditionally the most sublime of all lyric poetry, not only respond to specific occasions (athletic victories), but were commissioned to commemorate them. Similarly, some markedly “occasional” Neo-Latin poems are clearly lyric both in their form and poetic ambition – for instance, the ambitious Alcaic ode on the Spanish Armada probably by Theodore de Bèze (1519–1605) preserved in a single manuscript, and now made available by Dana Sutton (http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/beza//text.html). 2. Lyric forms I: Horatian and Pindaric odes The story of Horatian lyric meters in Neo-Latin poetry begins with Petrarch, one of whose verse letters to ancient authors is addressed to Horace, and composed in the first asclepiad meter. That important poem of the mid-fourteenth century is well discussed by Ludwig 1992 and Houghton (2009, 161–72), but his appropriation of Horatian meter remained an isolated experiment until its wholescale adoption around a century later by Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481). Filelfo’s fifty Latin odes in five books offered for the first time versions of all of Horace’s meters, although the shaping of the books as a kind of verse autobiography (Filelfo 2009, xiv) is quite different from anything we find in Horace, and his poetry has been criticized as unmusical and lacking in literary merit. Many of the early Italian humanists of the fifteenth century, including Landino, Campano, Pontano, Marullus and Navagero, composed a handful of odes in Horatian meters, usually in Sapphics or Alcaics and often in the form of hymns. In a departure from his Horatian model, nine of Filelfo’s odes incorporated a change of meter mid-poem, with 3.8 displaying more than thirty different meters within a single poem. Polymetric lyrics of this sort, dubbed “mixed” odes by Maddison (1960, 332), are a feature of many later Neo-Latin poets – the Latin songs included in John Barclay’s (1582–1621) hugely successful Latin novel, Argenis (1621), for instance, are of this “mixed” type. Latin odes could be “Pindaric” in two ways. Firstly, and most obvious, are long Latin poems that attempt to imitate Pindaric meters: that is, poems with complex strophes of irregular line length, sometimes (though not always) arranged in triads of strophe, antistrophe and epode. Latin Pindarics of this sort are a humanist invention – the first fully-formed triadic examples seem to be those of Benedetto Lampridio (d. 1540), whose metrical invention perhaps inspired Julius Caesar Scaliger’s prodigious project of metrical classification and experiment. Scaliger’s Poetics (1561) illustrated every known ancient meter, both Greek and Latin, and his own poetry demonstrates many of them: his Poemata Sacra (“Sacred Poems”; 1600) includes two triadic Pindaric birthday odes, one for Christ and one the Virgin Mary. One of the latest odes in this tradition is Milton’s remarkable Latin Pindaric ode to John Rouse (1646; published 1673). Evidently, this kind of verse had become a school exercise by the seventeenth century: Cambridge University Library MS Dd 5.77 preserves a Pindaric ode presented to the Dean of Westminster upon his return from the country to London, one of a selection of Westminster school exercises of the 1680s. But Latin odes could also be “Pindaric” in a smaller-scale – that is, more Horatian – manner. Typically composed in Alcaic stanzas, such poems evoke Pindaric grandeur via Horace’s major odes of Pindaric imitation (especially, ironically, Horace’s less-than-wholly-sincere claim to eschew Pindaric style in Odes 4.2). Poems in this tradition are generally concerned with serious themes, often of religious praise. Revard 2001 offers a fine guide to what she terms the Renaissance “hymn-ode”, and her companion volume (Revard 2009), though focused largely upon vernacular rather than Neo-Latin poetry, expands the discussion to the widespread adoption of this form, modeled on Horace’s fourth book as well as Pindar himself, for more worldly panegyric. Casimir Sarbiewski’s (1595–1640) poem to Pope Urban VIII, for instance, names Pindar directly (ter Urbanum Camoenae / Pindaricis cecinere plectris, “Three times have the Muses sung of Urban, in the Pindaric style”, Lyrica 1.3.51–52). Ben Jonson’s knowing Ode to Himself, based closely on Horace, Odes 4.2, was translated by his admirer Thomas Randolph into Latin Pindarics, and circulated surprisingly widely in this form: the Latin poem, with or without the English original, is preserved in twelve extant manuscript miscellanies (Moul 2010, 202–6). The grand Horatian ode of political praise was familiar enough as a sub-genre – both from Horace himself, and from popular Neo-Latin imitations of those poems, such as those by Sarbiewski – to allow for pastiche and ironic reappropriation: Abraham Cowley’s (1618–1667) witty Sapphic ode Viola, spoken by the violet flower herself, appropriates the language of the Horatian victory ode to describe a triumph over fervidos hostes, the dreadfully “seething enemy” (37–44): Fervidos hostes minimo tumultu Exigo sensim sine clade victrix Corpus haud sentit placide peracti Vulnera belli. Cedit, et cessisse rubescit herbae Ad coronamenta epulasque natae, Virium atque irae nimium potentis Conscia febris. “Gently I expel the feverish enemy with the least possible disturbance – I am a victor without a rout; the body scarcely feels the wounds of this war that is carried out so calmly. Fever gives way, and blushes to have given ground to a herb born for crowns and banquets – but give way she does, aware of the herb’s power and the force of her anger.” Each stanza is marked by Horatian allusion: here the phrase sine clade victrix is borrowed from Horace Odes 4.14.32 (stravit humum sine clade victor, “he covered the soil, a victor without a rout”) where it describes Tiberius’ victory over the Rhaetii. But the hostile forces of Cowley’s poem turn out to be not political enemies, but fever itself: as discussed in Moul 2012, the entire piece is an aide-memoire for the anti-pyretic powers of the violet. Cowley’s poem is a particularly marked example of the didactic appropriation of Horatian lyric, but the project is not in itself unusual: Jakob Balde’s (1604–68) moving ode, Ad Sabinum Fuscum Tyrolensem (“To Sabinus Fuscus, a Tyrolean”), for instance, urges his friend Fuscus to climb the mountains with him, and offers a panoramic survey both of the constellations of the night sky – all of which are imagined as contributing to the heavenly chorus of harmony – and the political landscape of Europe. The ode is dense with reminiscences of Horace, both the political odes and (in its opening section) the symposium pieces celebrating friendship, relaxation and the springtime, although the overall effect – and especially the climactic hymn of praise, at the moment at which the power of poetry can carry the poet no further, and alata virtus (“winged virtue”, 110) must continue the journey – is quite unlike anything in Horace. Modern students and scholars tend not to think of Horace as a particularly religious poet, but the Odes include many hymns (nos. 10, 21, 30, 32, and 35 in book 1 alone). Moreover, many of the great Christian hymns of the early church were themselves indebted to Horatian forms and models: Prudentius’ Cathemerinon (“Hymns for the Day”) and Peristephanon (“Crowns of the Martyrs”) both employ lyric forms imitated from Horace, Catullus and Seneca. This precedent encouraged the adoption of Horatian lyric for Christian religious verse: we find examples from the very beginnings of Neo-Latin poetry. The hymn to Diana by Landino (1424–1504) for instance (Laudes Dianae, “Praise of Diana”) is in Sapphics, the second most common meter in Horace’s odes; in the following century, Giovanni Francesco Quinziano Stoa of Brescia (1484–1557) experimented with presenting Christian – rather than pagan – devotion in Horatian meters, a project to which Jesuit Latin poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were to return enthusiastically. In Jacob Monavius’s (1546–1603) Ipse faciet (“He Will Act”, 1581; the title quotes psalm 36.5) we find an entire appendix devoted to largely religious imitations of a single Horatian ode, 4.3 (De Landtsheer 2006). The religious grandeur of the Horatian and Pindaric voice at its most prophetic, combined with the tendency to adopt Horatian and Pindaric lyric forms for religious verse of various kinds, created an early link between lyric and the translation of the psalms. Early modern writers regularly associated the divinely inspired verse of the greatest classical poets with the psalms of David and Solomon’s Song of Songs. In The Arte of English Poesie (1589, 23), George Puttenham claims that hymns were the original form of poetry amongst both the Greeks and the Hebrews; fifty years later, François Gomaer (1563–1641), a Dutch Calvinist theologian and Hebrew scholar, offered a detailed comparison of Pindar and the psalms in his Davidis Lyra (“David’s Lyre”, Leiden 1637). As a result, we find a plethora of psalm translations, rendered both in Horatian meters (though often in stylistic imitation of Pindar, or at least of Horace at his most Pindaric) and in various Latin versions of Pindaric form (see Gaertner 1956). Two of the most interesting examples are the psalm versions of Marc Antonio Flaminio (1498–1550) and of George Buchanan (1506–82): Flaminio’s paraphrases of the psalms, published in 1548, adopt not only Horatian meters but also his poetic style; Maddison describes how he “elaborates David’s brief images into typical Horatian vignettes” (Maddison 1960, 128). George Buchanan (1506–82), a major Scottish poet writing at around the same time, published his psalm translations in 1565, with many subsequent editions. In recent years, they have attracted interesting commentary by R. P. H. Green in particular (Ford and Green 2009, Buchanan 2011, Harrison 2012). Not all psalm translations, however, made use of Horatian meters: Pope Urban VIII’s Latin “paraphrase” of psalm 136, first published in his Poemata of 1631, uses elegiac couplets, the subject of the next section (for psalm paraphrases of the seventeenth century in general, see Leblanc 1960). 3. Lyric forms II: Elegy The elegiac couplet was the single most popular meter for Neo-Latin verse. It has been used for poems of almost all forms and lengths and is, as a result, the most difficult form to delimit for the purposes of this chapter; in particular, I have excluded from consideration here long poems that have more in common with didactic or epic verse, and short pieces which are best understood as epigrams – though this is a difficult distinction to make consistently and usefully. An important influence upon this range is the variety of genres in which Ovid wrote in elegiac couplets, including the verse letters of the Heroides (“Heroines) and Tristia (“Sorrows”), the Fasti (“Calendar”) and the comic didactic of the Ars Amatoria (“Art of Love”) and Remedia Amoris (“Remedies for Love”), as well as the books of love elegies (Amores, “Loves”). Following IJsewijn and Sacré (1998, 80) I focus here upon medium-length poems that deal in particular with strong emotions, whether of love (as in Ovid’s Amores, as well as those of Propertius and Tibullus), grief, or praise. Collections of Amores are found among the earliest Neo-Latin verse, including the Cinthia of Enea Silvio Piccolomini (1405–64, later Pope Pius II, on this see Charlet 1997). This genre was so popular that most major Neo-Latin authors produced at least one collection of this sort – examples from that enormous field include Pontano (1429–1503) and Politian (1454–94) among many others in Italy, Du Bellay in France (1522–60), Conrad Celtis in Germany (1459–1508), Klemens Janicki in Poland (1516–42), Johannes Secundus in the Low Countries (1511–36) and John Milton in England (1608–74). Such collections are typically focused upon a single woman, given a classicizing and anonymizing name – such as Piccolomini’s “Cinthia” and Landino’s “Xandra” – in imitation of the Cynthia, Delia and Lesbia of the classical poets, although the details and narrative coherence of these collections varies: Pontano’s De amore coniugali (“On Conjugal Love”), for instance, is one of several Renaissance elegists to celebrate his love for his lawful wife, while the four books of Celtis’ Amores (1502) are each dedicated to a different love affair and a different region of Germany (Robert 2003 on Celtis; Pieper 2008 on Landino’s Xandra and its generic context; Parker 2012 on the genre in general). The sheer familiarity of the genre and its conventions invites pastiche and knowing misappropriation. Tito Strozzi (c. 1425–1505) begins a typical piece by imagining Cupid, carelessly asleep and unarmed beneath a tree (Eroticon 2.16.1–2): Materna caperet dum forte sub arbore somnum Armaque securus deposuisset Amor . . . While he [Cupid] happened to be taking a nap beneath his mother’s tree And had set down his weapons without the slightest concern . . . Coming upon him in this vulnerable state, Diana does her best to extinguish his torches and break his arrows before Venus comes to the rescue of her son. The motif – of Cupid disarmed – is a familiar one, and ripe for playful variation. More than a century later, we find what seems at first a similar scene in the fourth elegy of Thomas Campion’s Poemata (“Poems”, 1595), De Mellea Lusus (“On Mellea, a Sport”, 1–3): Pulchra roseta inter mea Mellea pulchrior illis Dum legit umbroso mollia fraga solo: Venit Amor, qui iam pharetra positisque sagittis . . . While in a fair rose-garden my Mellea, fairer still, Was picking tender strawberries from the shady ground. Cupid arrived, and now, his quiver and arrows set aside . . . There are several points in common here: the scene-setting with dum, the pastoral shade, the presence of Cupid, the erotic connotations – in Strozzi’s piece, the boy Cupid is implicitly vulnerable, like those he wounds with love; in Campion, we imagine immediately at line 3 that Cupid himself has fallen in love with Mellea and so been “disarmed”. In fact, Campion puts his own spin on the scene, as the poem continues (4–6): gestitat ignivomo ferra forata cavo Pulvis agit sine voce pilas ubi concipit ignem, Et nivis in tacito pulvere candor inest. He [Cupid] was wielding bored-out irons with fire-belching muzzles. Soundlessly, his powder propels balls when it takes fire, And there is a snowy whiteness to this silent powder. The forceful alliteration of line four and the crude vividness of ignivomo (not a classical word) is part of the surprise: Campion’s Cupid is not disarmed but extra armed, having upgraded his classical bow and arrows for an early modern firearm. The technology itself attracts some of the sort of sensuous descriptive attention we expect to be lavished upon the beloved, and also confounds our expectations: the gunpowder is miraculously silent (sine voce; tacito) but also beautiful, shining white like snow (nivis . . . candor): ordinary gunpowder is black, and muskets of course were noisy. The reversal of our expectations contributes to the dramatic setting because the silence of the gun allows Cupid to surprise Mellea, while the set of attributes and associations (fire and snow; bright beauty and silence) echo the tropes of erotic description. Neo-Latin elegiac collections are by no means confined to love poetry: collections of Amores often included poems of mourning or political praise, influenced perhaps particularly by the varied components of Propertius’ fourth book. For all his knowing manipulation of the tropes of love elegy, Campion opened the Book of Elegies contained in his Poemata, with a poem that turns from the tropes of love elegy to the political and poetic blessings of England: the English poet can afford to invoke Cupid (and his genre) because the peace under Elizabeth I allows room for the militia amoris. The poem ends: Alme puer, teneris adsit tua gratia musis, / Paces sive deae, seu tua bella canunt (“Gentle child, may your grace attend our tender Muses, whether they sing of the goddess’ [Venus’s] peace, or your own wars”; Elegy 1.41–42). The reference to Cupid and Venus here strikes us as a generic, rather than genuinely religious feature, but many Neo-Latin poets composed religious elegies, whether of devotion (for instance to saints or the Virgin Mary) or, in imitation of the Heroides, from one sacred character to another: the Heroidum Christianarum epistolae (“Letters of Christian Heroines”) of the German poet Helius Eobanus Hessus (1488–1540) even includes a verse letter from Christ to his mother Mary, and her reply (on which see Manuwald, forthcoming). And in addition to the many elegiac poems of mourning there is a distinct sub-genre of the “exile” poem, in which the poet mourns for himself. That form is indebted of course to Ovid’s exile verse, but interpreted with varying degrees of reality: Johannes Secundus (1511–36) is merely homesick in his elegy 3.11; John Milton (1608–74) was probably simply spending a university vacation back in London in his first elegy, a highly self-conscious and ironic appropriation of Ovid, in which it is Cambridge, not London, that takes on the bleak barrenness of Ovid’s Black Sea; whereas the elderly Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) was enduring a real exile in Prague when he wrote his famous Elegy to Denmark (see Skafte Jensen 2009). The range of possibilities for Neo-Latin elegy is almost limitless: Houghton 2013 offers a lively overview. 4. Lyric forms III: Short lyrics (Catullan and Anacreontic) Although Catullus wrote ambitious long poems (including the epithalamia 61 and 62, and the epyllion 64) as well as his shorter poems of praise, invective and eroticism, his Renaissance rediscovery generally preferred the shorter pieces. Brief lyrics in a Catullan style – and often in hendecasyllables, a meter associated strongly with Catullus – are found in thousands of Neo-Latin poets from Giovanni Pontano (1429–1503) onwards. The most important work on the Renaissance reception of Catullus in general, and on Pontano in particular, is by Julia Haig Gaisser, whose comments stand behind much of my remarks in this section. She describes this craze for the hendecasyllable as follows (Haig Gaisser 1993, 197): So too, in its style, diction, subject matter, and affect, the Catullan hendecasyllable provided the language for a certain type of Renaissance lyric; and even as the tradition acquired new and non-Catullan (or even anti-Catullan) elements, it identified itself – often explicitly – as Catullan, and the poets – even at their farthest from the Catullan sensibility – saw themselves as devotees of Catullan poetry. Giovanni Pontano’s three Catullan collections, Pruritus (“[Erotic] Itch”, 1449), Parthenopeus sive Amores (“The Neapolitan, or Loves”, 1457) and Hendecasyllabi sive Baiae (“Hendecasyllables, or Baiae”) dating from around 1500) offer quite different perspectives upon his central model – Pruritus is often obscene, Parthenopeus combines recognizably Catullan material with poems more readily characterized as odes or love elegies, whereas the Hendecasyllabi helped to establish the principally Catullan associations of the hendecasyllable, as described by Haig Gaisser. Several features are characteristic both of Pontano’s Catullan imitations and the hundreds of poems composed across Europe in a similar vein in the following centuries. One is a self-conscious engagement with Catullus’ programmatic tropes, especially of the relative insignificance of his small-scale genre (described as nugae, “trifles”, at 1.4) and the capacity of the poet to remain chaste himself, while writing titillating or even frankly indecent material (an idea indebted in particular to Catullus 16). Specific images are also very widely imitated: none more so than the “many kisses” of Catullus 5 and 7 (in fact, Campion’s fourth elegy, discussed above, incorporates this Catullan feature at lines 13–20) and the ambiguous sparrow, beloved of Lesbia and mourned after its death, of Catullus 2 and 3. Martial famously interpreted that sparrow as Catullus’ penis in 11.5, and in Parthenopeus 1.5 Pontano followed Martial’s reading, insisting that his “dove” is for the pleasure only of his girlfriend, not “boy catamites”. Both Catullus’ kisses and his dead sparrow won a long poetic life. The nineteen Basia (“Kisses”) of Johannes Secundus (1511–36) were enormously influential upon love poetry, both Latin and vernacular, across Europe: Ben Jonson’s well-known and much circulated lyrics To Celia, for instance, from his play Volpone (1606), are indebted both to Catullus and to Secundus. As for Catullus’ sparrow, we find a myriad of Latin “bird” poems: early in the eighteenth century the French Jesuit poet Noël Étienne Sanadon (1676–1733) published In mortem passeris (“On the Death of a Sparrow”), in his 1715 collection of Latin verse (Carmina 3.2): Lugete, o Charites, Ioci, Lepores, Et quantum est volucrum venustiorum, Et quantum est iuvenum pudentiorum. Weep, o Graces, o Pleasures, o Charms, And as many of the lovely birds as may, And as many of the chaste young men. The poem is in hendecasyllables, and imitates Catullus in its imagery, structure and vocabulary at many points. Catullus 3 begins Lugete, o Veneres Cupidinesque (“Weep, o Venuses and Cupids”), and the second line of Sanadon’s poem is lifted almost verbatim from Catullus 3.2, altering only the fourth word: Catullus’ hominum (“men”) has become volucrum (“birds”), although the missing hominum is perhaps echoed in the iuvenum (“young men”) of line 3. Sanadon’s version of Catullus retains the suggestion of an erotic context: this sparrow belonged to Thyrsis, and was for him, as for Lesbia, a source of pleasure (innocens voluptas, “innocent pleasure”, line 4; Catullus uses the more erotically charged term deliciae, “delight” at 3.4). Moreover it was killed, it turns out, not by a hawk or a cat, as we might expect, but at the hands of Cupid, that ales / implumis (“bird without wings”, 11–12). The poem implies a complicated scenario: Thyrsis loved the bird and played with it, but in their games the bird was joined by Cupid, intent upon attack: Ipse est pessimus alitum Cupido, Milvis improbiorque, felibusque, Qui colludere passeri solebat, Atque una pueri in sinum volabat, Et circum petulante vectus ala Quaerebat tenerum ustulare pectus. That’s Cupid, the worst of all birds, More wicked than sparrow-hawks, than cats: He would play alongside the sparrow, And fly with it into the boy’s lap, Carried around on the bird’s bold wings, He’d try to scorch his [Thyrsis’] tender breast. Finally Cupid killed the bird in a fury quum posset domino nihil nocere, “because he could not wound its master”. The poem’s speaker is never identified but the piece itself is an artful appropriation – and, in a sense, a rejection – of the Catullan tradition: the virtuous Thyrsis is impervious to Cupid, and as such blithely innocent, too, of the obscene interpretation of his own pet sparrow. The lyric’s edge relies upon our readerly lack of innocence: that is, upon our knowledge of that tradition. We understand why Cupid is in this poem, even if Thyrsis does not. Related to this general fashion for short lyrics in the Catullan tradition is the widespread sixteenth and seventeenth century adoption of anacreontics: a meter of even shorter and more rapid lines than the hendecasyllable (Tilg 2013). The trend was inaugurated by Henri Estienne, who published the Carmina Anacreontica (“Songs of Anacreon”) in 1554: fifty previously unpublished poems of pseudo-Anacreon, in a meter previously found only in a handful of Greek and Latin lyrics, including the Greek Anthology and a hymn of Prudentius (Cathemerinon 6; Laurens 2003). Estienne’s work triggered almost immediately a great wave of imitations, first in France, and then across Europe (O’Brien 1995 and Laurens 2003). One example among many is the Amphitheatrum Gratiarum (“Amphitheater of Graces”, 1613) of the German poet Caspar von Barth (7.18.1–12): Gremio meae Neaerae Suave dormitabam. – Quid somniatus ergo Es, amabilis Rosille? – Apis fui Matina, Suxi favum e labello, Florem extuli ex ocellis Et purpuram ex genellis, Ut inde mel liquarem, Mel dulce, mel suave, Condiret unde Carmen Anacreon venustum. Upon my Neaera’s lap I dreamt a sweet dream. – What did you dream, My dear Rosillus? – I was a Matine bee, I sucked the lip’s honey, I took the eyes’ bloom And the cheeks’ purple, And strained from them honey, Sweet honey, fine honey, From which Anacreon constructs A charming song. Poems of this sort draw upon recognizably Catullan elements. Like Lesbia’s sparrow (compare Catullus 3.8), the speaker of this poem loves to rest in the lap (gremio, 1) of his mistress; the mistress’ name is Neaera, most famous as the love interest of Johannes Secundus’ Catullan Basia. But the meter here is anacreontic, and the poem is identified as belonging to Anacreon at line 12. The poetic lineage is further nuanced when the speaker reveals himself to be a “Matine bee”: an image of poetic composition on a small-scale in Horace, Odes 4.2.27–32, where the allusion to the mountain Matinus in Apulia alludes to Horace’s native land. However, the erotic connotations of the bee, who sucks nectar from Neaera’s lip (and ends the poem by leaving his sting [aculeum in line 15] in her lap) are not Horatian. 5. Imitation and allusion As the extract from von Barth’s poem demonstrates, Neo-Latin lyric is marked almost without exception by dense intertextuality, especially with the classical authors, but also with other Neo-Latin poets. The convoluted impression of a “patchwork of quotations”, amounting in some cases to something approaching a cento, is one of the features of Neo-Latin verse for which it is most often criticized. But these techniques, which include the imitation of theme, structure and style as well as specific reminiscences, can also be a source of creativity and emotional force. Any one of a host of Neo-Latin poems might demonstrate this point: I offer here a brief reading of just one – a poem which has to my knowledge attracted no previous sustained attention. George Herbert’s poem, De musica sacra, mentioned above, is composed in an Horatian meter (alcaics) and its first stanza closes with a borrowing from Horace: Cur efficaci, Deucalion, manu, Post restitutos fluctibus obices, Mutas in humanam figuram Saxa supervacuasque cautes? Why, Deucalion, did you use your hand’s power, After the waves were once more barred,, To transform into human shape Rocks and useless crags? The last line of the stanza, supervacuasque cautes replicates in its structure and metrical position the final phrase of Odes 2.20, supervacuas honores, the last ode of Horace’s second book. The Horatian poem describes the poet’s metamorphosis into a mellifluous, white bird capable of ranging as far as the boundaries of the empire. The final phrase, supervacuas honores, describes the “empty honors” of the tomb that Horace dismisses as irrelevant to him in his new form. The transformation is an emblem, albeit a self-conscious and perhaps mildly ironic one, of the poet’s power and immortality. Herbert’s poem begins with a phrase borrowed in part from the end of Horace’s second book of odes. But the opening evocation of the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, the only human couple to survive a deluge sent by Zeus, is also Horatian. Odes 1.2 also begins with a flood, in that case a devastating storm in Rome, which is at once compared (5–6) with the mythical flood survived by Pyrrha and her husband. The parallel is again a significant one, because Horace’s poem, like Herbert’s, is concerned with the interaction between human and divine, and in particular the punishment of and atonement for human sin. In Horace, the sin is that of the Roman civil war, and the central question is to which of the gods Jupiter shall assign the role of atonement. Horace suggests Apollo, Venus, Mars and finally Mercury, in the guise of a human youth: that is, Octavian himself, with whose victory over the Parthians the poem ends (te duce, Caesar, “with you as leader, Caesar”, 52). The presiding “sin” of Herbert’s ode is the failure to respond to music, here described – partly by the structural parallel with the Horatian poem – as a central mode of communication between the human and the divine. Both poems are structured by a series of characters. Just as Horace’s list combines mythical (Pyrrha, Proteus), divine and historical figures, so Herbert’s poem moves from classical myths and divinities to biblical rulers: Deucalion, Orpheus, Amphion, the Graces, the Muse, Moses and David. This is not to occlude the differences between these odes, the most significant of which is that Horace’s ode looks to a particular person – Octavian – as well as a specific activity – successful war against foreign (rather than internal) enemies – as the mode of Rome’s redemption. Herbert’s ode, by contrast, identifies no specific modern savior, and the central activity is the making of music, not war. For all its celebration of music, Herbert’s ode ends, as it began, with an attack upon the Puritans for their noisy but unharmonious failure to appreciate the power of musical praise and celebration: the movement of the ode, unlike Horace’s, is circular, with the positive celebration in the center of the poem (21–37) rather than the end. Moreover, that celebration of music’s power includes phrases quite alien to Horace’s Latin: Ramenta coeli, guttulaeque / Deciduae melioris orbis! (“Flakes of heaven, and the falling / Droplets of a better world”, 35–36). The imagery here, at once so concrete (ramenta, guttulae) and so removed from worldly experience (coeli, melioris orbis) is characteristic of Herbert, unthinkable in Horace. One aspect of the poem’s force, as in so many Neo-Latin lyrics, lies in the counterpoint between its Horatian structure, meter and specific allusion and the unHoratian – Christian, and in this case markedly metaphysical – imagery with which the heavenly power of music is described. 6. Context, sequence, and the poetry book The passage quoted from George Herbert’s De musica sacra strikes us as not only quintessentially lyric (in this case, Horatian) in its form and tone, but also partly about lyric, in so far as it works carefully to conflate poets and musicians (Amphion, Orpheus, David, Horace himself) in its mythological canon. But in fact the poem is one of a sequence, Musae responsoriae (“Responsorial Muses”), written in response to a theological controversy, and more specifically to a long and vituperative poem by the theologian Andrew Melville, attacking Anglican ritual practices and the refusal by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge to abandon these features of their worship. Both Melville’s poem and Herbert’s sequence in response are certainly “occasional”, and moreover Herbert’s wide-ranging sequence of forty short poems, in a variety of meters, several addressed to Meville himself (and most of the rest on the various aspects of Anglican rite that Herbert seeks to defend), are easily categorized as epigrams. But were we to encounter number 23, De musica sacra in isolation – whether in a published anthology, a manuscript miscellany or as a single loose leaf in an assortment of papers – we would quite naturally read these thirteen alcaic stanzas as primarily a Latin ode. Herbert’s is a fine example of an Horatian lyric that is partly about the function of such lyric itself; but its larger purpose can only be understood in the context of the sequence – of occasional epigrams on a theological controversy – of which it is a part. The role of sequence and context in our interpretation of Neo-Latin lyric is of particular importance: while relatively few editions exist of complete collections by Neo-Latin poets, the reader of Neo-Latin lyric will continue to encounter many poems for the first time in an anthology or appendix, just as so much Neo-Latin lyric poetry was preserved and circulated in early modern published anthologies or manuscript miscellanies and commonplace books. It is true of shorter poems in particular that the chief aesthetic effect may be created by cumulative reiterations of a given image or idea over a large number of pieces that are relatively minor in themselves; similarly, a collection of love elegies, which invites the reader to reconstruct the sequence of a love-affair over time, reads quite differently from an individual piece taken in isolation. This is if anything still more true of Neo-Latin collections, which may incorporate a mix of poems that would be confined to separate collections (for instance, eclogues, odes and elegies) in a classical context. 7. Conclusion: Why read or work on Neo-Latin lyric? Neo-Latin lyric poetry is a vast field, and one which makes considerable demands upon the modern reader: not least in its variety of meters, the daunting reliance upon classical allusion and complex intertextual relationships with Neo-Latin predecessors, and the alien social and political institutions – of patronage, dedication, political and religious controversy – in which it arose. Those demands are increased by the difficulties of accessing this material, so much of which remains unedited, or inadequately so. All of this makes tempting territory for scholars, and a great deal of work remains to be done in editing and explicating the most important of these texts, their literary form and significance, and their relationship to other literature, both Latin and vernacular. Work of this sort has benefits for classicists and classics departments as well as scholars of Renaissance culture: several classical texts which are routinely taught as if a single extant author is more-or-less the sum of their Latin genre – such as Horace’s Odes and Epodes, or Martial’s Epigrams – can only benefit from a greater awareness of the riches of post-classical Latin literature, and the enormous variety of ways in which these texts were interpreted, challenged and rewritten in the changing contexts of medieval, Renaissance and early modern societies. Ignoring Neo-Latin lyric moreover distorts to a great extent our appreciation and understanding of the work of Renaissance and early modern poets: Petrarch and Milton are examples of major poets who wrote in both the Latin and vernacular, and they are also rare examples of authors whose eminence is so great that both sides of their poetic personality have attracted critical attention (albeit unevenly). But a host of accomplished Latin authors continue to be taught and studied as if they wrote only in the vernacular, and many others are effectively excluded from the canon because they were primarily Latin poets. There is historical as well as literary importance in attending more carefully to the Latin literary tradition. But the first and best reason for reading and thinking about Neo-Latin lyric must always be that so much of it is good poetry: beautiful, precise and evocative, poetry which extends our sense of what Latin verse can be and can do. Further Reading Laurens 2004 (introduction and parallel translations in French) is currently the only readily available paperback anthology of Neo-Latin lyric. Of those no longer in print, Arnaldi, Gualdo Rosa, and Monti Sabia 1964 offers excellent coverage of fifteenth-century Italian authors, Laurens 1975 is the most complete, McFarlane 1980 is slight but with a good representation of erotic elegy. Nichols 1979 has parallel translations in English. The anthologies of Jesuit verse by Mertz, Murphy, and IJsewijn 1989 and Thill, Fumaroli, and Banderier 1999 print many odes. Kühlmann, Seidel and Wiegand 1997 is an accessible introduction to German lyric. Raven 1998 is an accessible and easily available guide to Latin meter. As in all questions of Neo-Latin literature, readers should begin by consulting IJsewijn and Sacré (1998, 79–99). The fine overview offered by Haig Gaisser, forthcoming concentrates on odes and Catullan lyric, permitting a fuller discussion of those forms than is possible here, and with different emphases. On Horatian imitation see Ludwig 1992, Maddison 1960, (for German poets) Schäfer 1976 and (for English poets) Binns 1990. Revard 2001 discusses Latin Pindarics. On Catullan imitation, see Haig Gaisser 1993. On erotic elegy, see most recently Braden 2010, Parker 2012 and Houghton 2013; Ludwig 1976 also remains informative. Recent collections of essays focusing upon elegy are Chappuis Sandoz 2011, Cardini and Coppini 2009, and Catanzaro and Santucci 1999. The NeoLatina series has produced several monographs on individual elegiac poets. The most significant recent monograph on Neo-Latin elegy is Pieper 2008. On psalm translations see Gärtner 1956. The chapters on elegy and lyric in Moul, forthcoming supplement this account. 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