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cum ridere voles Epicuri de grege porcum. |
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In the midst of hope and care, fear and anger, believe every day has shone the last for you: me you will see fat and shining with skin well-cared-for when you want to laugh at a pig from Epicurus' herd. |
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This will become a familiar trait also in Seneca, as with the famous ending to his diatribe on the resistance of the sapiens to noise in Epistles 56: |
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tunc ergo te scito esse compositum, cum ad te nullus clamor pertinebit, cum te nulla vox tibi excutiet, non si blandietur, non si minabitur, non si inani sono vana circumstrepet. 'quid ergo? non aliquando commodius est et carere convicio?' fateor. itaque ego ex hoc loco migrabo. experiri et exercere me volui. quid necesse est diutius torqueri, cum tam facile remedium Vlixes sociis etiam adversus Sirenas invenerit? |
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So you mustn't be sure of your equilibrium until no clamour affects you, no voice shakes your hold on yourself, whether it coax or threaten or boom emptily round you in meaningless uproar. 'Yes? and isn't it sometimes more convenient to be free from noise?' I admit it. That's why I shall shortly make a flit. I wanted to test and train myself. Why stay longer on the rack, when Ulysses discovered such a simple antidote for his ships company even against the sirens? (trans. Phillips Barker). |
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But the most obvious figure to employ Romantic Irony is not the moralist but the lover. Propertius has a number of celebrated examples, well discussed in recent years by Lefèvre and Papanghelis.33 It is a lack of appreciation of the role of Romantic Irony in Propertius and Tibullus that is the most conspicuous deficiency in P. Veyne's otherwise excellent Roman Erotic Elegy. Too often he makes the humorous elements undermine or subvert the pathos of love:34 |
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Here and there, in the middle of this picture of sharp, hardly harmonious colours, our attention is drawn to fragments full of a charming humanity . . . But if we step back three paces, so as to grasp the whole picture, suddenly something ironic happens. When these quite human fragments are set along with everything else, which is so different, the contrast is so improbable that our eyes no longer know how to make sense of it, and the uncertainty retrospectively confers a humorous intention on the fragments. This art is not about human warmth; rather it is a fiction based upon a haughty sense of humour . . . Instead of regretting that his best moments are ruined by bizarre digressions, bad taste, or an abuse of mythology, it would be better to acknowledge that he is doing what he meant to do . . . |
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Romantic irony, however, offers a further alternative to 'regretting' the humorous or bizarre elements in Propertius or seeing them as undermining the seriousness, or indeed dismissing the whole game as merely piquant |
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33 Lefèvre (1966) 152, 156, 1723; Papanghelis (1987). |
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34 Veyne (1988) 323. |
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