Preface

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199734283.002.0006

Front Matter

Preface

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https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199734283.002.0006

Pages

ix–x

Published:

June 2013

Extract

The main inquiry of this book emerged from a hunch: what if Roman readers did not read literary character the same way we do? What did Roman audiences expect from the figures that populate their texts? This book begins by posing these questions and presenting the cultural and intellectual background to this thought experiment: in the introduction, my aim is to uncover the patterns of thought that shape Roman ideas of character in philosophy, rhetoric, and literature. These formalized verbal practices all share modes of transmission through education, audience (elite Romans), concepts, and terminology. Matthew Roller’s brilliant investigation of exemplarity in Roman culture provided further insight into Roman habits of replication and emulation that helped me to understand the function of literary character more deeply. Literary characters, like figures of Roman myth and history, accrete and embody multiple associations. Roman poetry assumes characters’ communicative function as semiotic and referential, with less interest in psychological “roundness.” My readings of individual literary characters explore this semiotic and referential potential and their function within the poetics of each work. The implicit allusiveness of character effectively transmits poetic genealogy, a lesson I suggest Roman poets may have first observed in Apollonius’ epic. Each of the chapters presents a study of an individual character and demonstrates a way to read that figure. The techniques of characterization can range from the forensic (Vergil’s Aeneas and his alter ego, Paris) to the philosophical (Stoic exemplarity and Lucan’s Cato), and characterization can have surprisingly powerful effects on narrative, as I argue in the analyses of Statius’ Parthenopaeus and Amphiaraus. I hope that these readings will stimulate further reassessment and appreciation of Roman literary characterization.

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