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language). It is therefore natural that Edmunds is much concerned about how to distribute this requisite historical knowledge over his three readings. In theory, he 'suspends detailed historical information' (3) in the first reading, undertakes 'historical and philological research' (24) in the second reading, but only 'within the aesthetic perspective of the first' (25), whereas his third reading is 'strictly historical' (25). But because he uses 'standard grammars, commentaries, and dictionaries' (3) in the first reading, that reading recognizes Horace's imitation of Alcaeus, fr. 338 Voigt (45, 911), argues from the (mistaken) view that 'Roman houses did not have the kind of windows from which a landscape could be observed' (8),40 and is knowledgeable about the habitats of trees in ancient Italy (13). The second reading then tries to find out what associations 'the Romans' (25) connected with Mt. Soracte (2527) and with the name 'Thaliarchus' (3233), questions which are discussed in the standard commentaries just as well, but not, in these cases, to Edmunds's satisfaction. No commentary, however, has detected the references to Lucretius that Edmunds believes the poem to make, and for that reason, apparently, these are discussed in the third reading (5965). This third reading 'attempts to establish the horizon of expectation of the ode's original audience' (41), but of course the audience's recognition of Alcaeus belongs in that horizon just as much as their (alleged) recognition of Lucretius (cf. 5960), together with the associations of trees, of Mt. Soracte and of the name 'Thaliarchus'. What this suggests is that even in his first and second readings Edmunds was engaged in reconstructing the horizon of expectation of the Roman audience, in establishing how they would have understood the poem (he himself speaks of the 'code' shared by the poet and his readers: 4, 16, etc.). That Edmunds does not recognize this seems to be due to the lingering influence of New Criticism, with its puritanical attitude toward history (just as in Jauss we recognized the unacknowledged presence of werkimmanente Interpretation). This suspicion is corroborated by the observation that Edmunds pretends to read the poem in isolation: he discusses the eight poems preceding it in the published book as part of the horizon of expectation of the original audience (4359), but not as part of his own. He also never explains (just as Jauss did not) why he selected this particular poem in the first place; the answer presumably is that the Soracte Ode has given rise to a highly notorious, long-standing interpretative controversy in classical philology, and has been used before to stage a confrontation between 'philology' and 'hermeneutics'.41 Edmunds sides emphatically with 'hermeneutics' against 'philolo- |
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40 Cf. the commentary of Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) 116. But the owners of Roman villas set great store by views of the surrounding scenery, especially from the dining rooms; cf. e.g. Pliny the Younger, Epistles 2.17.5 and 5.6.19. |
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41 See Kresic (ed.) (1981) 27598. In Nauta (1991) I had selected the Soracte Ode independently of Edmunds. |
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