CICERO AS A HELLENISTIC POET

摘要

Cicero’s few pronouncements on contemporary poets have tended to serve as ancounterpoint to what we think we know about developments in Roman poetrynduring the 50s and 40s B.C.E., locating him in that precinct of literary Rome thatnwas not favourably disposed to the literary currents of his day. In particular, attentionnfocusses on his well-known references made in 50 B.C.E. to some unidentifiednpoets as οἱ νεωτέροι, who have a taste for spondaic line ends;1 in 46 B.C.E. tonpoetae noui, who no longer regard suppression of final ‘s’ as stylistic refinement;2nand in 45 B.C.E. to cantores Euphorionis who don’t appreciate Ennian tragedy.3 Thencasual vagueness of these references suggests that Cicero was not referring to onlyna few individuals or a fringe movement, but rather to a prevailing trend in literarynfashion that would have been readily recognized by contemporaries; and the generallyndepreciatory tone of his assessment of contemporary poetry is unmistakable.nWhen Cicero wrote these remarks, Catullus (probably) and Calvus (certainly) werendead, but Cinna was alive and, as Hollis notes, Cornelius Gallus, ‘whose hero wasnEuphorion of Chalcis’, might have been starting to make his mark.4 Cicero, ofncourse, was a poet himself and in the fragments of his early verse many criticsnhave detected tendencies that would seem to have aligned him with the neotericnaesthetic that is rejected in these comments. His views on contemporary poets innthe early 40s have therefore at times seemed somewhat paradoxical. As one has putnit, ‘there is a certain irony in the reflection that Cicero himself had once been, inneffect, a New Poet: the very young man who translated Aratus’ Phaenomena, whoncomposed the Pontius Glaucus, the Alcyones, was a student of Hellenistic elegance