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That's how men should sing as they work in the sun.
But as for your hungry love, Bucaeus, keep it
For your mother's ears when she wakes you in bed at dawn. |
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But it is Boucaeus who is the surrogate for the Hellenistic poet. Art is absurd, unreal, derivative: but it still matters. Poet and reader alike accept 'the challenge of the past, of the already said' and both succeed, once again, 'in speaking of love'.45 |
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It would be easy to multiply instances of Romantic Irony in Hellenistic poetry: I have not, for instance, even touched on Callimachus.46 But I want to deal more directly with the second, more pervasive aspect of Romantic Irony that I have already touched upon, and then to broaden the issue still further and to return to the political aspects of irony that I mentioned earlier. Theocritus' shepherd singers are surrogates for the poet himself: in some way they stand in for him. A poet within a poem is the most obvious form of mise-en-abyme. But there are many other possible authonal surrogates -and surrogates for readers, and the literary work. Any form of non-literary writing can obviously be read in this way, and is often linked with literary forms: so for instance Ovid's epistolary heroines in the Heroides and Byblis in Metamorphoses 9 are clearly figured like love elegists. Prophecy is so closely linked with poetry that it is almost not a trope to see 'Lucan in disguise'47 when Appius consults the oracle in Bellum Civile 5. Works of art and handicrafts very frequently mirror in some way the texts that contain them like the basket in Idyll 1, or any of the myriad figured objects of ekphrasis. And the reader's interpretative adventures may be similarly reflected in characters who face within the texts their own hermeneutic problems, even those like Aeneas who give up and rerum . . . ignarus imagine gaudet. And ultimately there are the grandest tropes of all: the poet as God, creating order from chaos, the poet as ruler, lord of all she sways. These |
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45 Eco (1984) 678: see above n. 18. |
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46 See e.g. the end of the first episode in the Aetia, where the request to the Graces to 'come now and wipe your anointed hands upon my elegies that they may live for many a year' (fr. 7, trans. Trypanis) is both a piece of bizarrerie and a reference to the material reality of the book, anointed with cedar oil; or the end of the Acontius and Cydippe episode, with its reference to the source in Xenomedes (fr. 75), from where 'the maiden's story ran to my Calliope'. |
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47 A sub-heading in Masters (1992) 133: his whole work is much concerned with surrogacy. |
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