RE: VIRGIL: "Hellenistic" as a category of thought and scholarship

[fabio paolo barbieri]

Nobody has replied, so I guess it's up to me.  And I have no answer, only 
guesses.  It seems to me that the invention of the distinction between 
Classical and Hellenistic must be a feature of the late eighteenth-early 
nineteenth sensibility that followed Winckelmann's rediscovery - or is it an 
invention? - of the "noble simplicity" of classical Greek art.  Another 
essential stage in the invention of the distinction must have been 
Schiller's famous essay on the distinction between "naiv" and 
"sentimentalisch" poetry, a distinction that is easily applied to any 
artform.  Naiv means unselfconscious, direct, a form of expression that does 
not reflect on its own being because it is wholly concerned with the things 
it has to express; and sentimentalisch means one in which the mode of 
expression, and the heritage of past forms, are a major consideration, one 
that loses that clear directness because the artist has too clear in his/her 
mind the need to work on form as such and to react to the past.  The very 
word "Hellenistic", implying as it does a turning back to "Hellenism", a 
relationship that is primarily with a past culture rather than with the 
living experience of the present, seems to me to depend entirely on 
Schiller's categories.  I would, under correction, suggest that Hellenism as 
a category must have come in in the first or second (at most) quarter of the 
nineteenth century, and in Germany.  At any rate, we all know what an 
overwhelming influence on all modern thinking on the Classics 
nineteenth-century Germany had.


From: David Wilson-Okamura <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: VIRGIL: "Hellenistic" as a category of thought and scholarship
Date: Sat, 04 Sep 2004 13:55:52 -0400
We talked about this briefly several years ago, but something came up that
made me think of it again, and I need help. Brooks Otis and, more recently,
Wendell Clausen have emphasized Virgil's indebtedness to Hellenistic poetry
and, beyond that, to what we might call the Hellenistic sensibility, by
which I mean a liking for poetry that is (a) polished, (b) subjective, and
(c) short. This is a useful set of ideas, but it's one, so far as I can
tell, that the Renaissance just didn't have. Or rather, critics in the
Renaissance had them separately, as ideas about form, but they didn't group
those ideas chronologically; they weren't aware of the "Hellenistic
sensibility" as an episode in the history of taste. They did have a sense
that Ennius and Livius Andronicus come before Virgil, and that Ennius was
crude. There's also a very keen sense of the difference between Tacitus and
Cicero (not to mention classical and post-classical Latin). But not of
movements and styles within the late Republic.
Am I wrong about this?* And if I'm not, when do scholars begin to talk
about these things? Ideally, the answer would be in the form of an article
citation. Pieces of the answer could probably be assembled from histories
of classical scholarship (e.g., Sandys, Pfeiffer), but these are really
capsule biographies; what I'm looking for is the history of an idea.
* It's been a couple years since I looked at Julia Gaisser's _Catullus and
His Renaissance Readers_. Will order it up on ILL and check. What I do
recall is that Poliziano knows some of the sources for Catullus as texts.
What eludes him still is the category.
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David Wilson-Okamura        http://virgil.org          [EMAIL PROTECTED]
East Carolina University    Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c
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