Hellish Love: Genre in Claudian's De raptu Proserpinae

Hellish Love:

Genre in Claudian's De raptu Proserpinae

For Gian-Biagio Conte, genre, rather than being rigidly constituted by formal features, is "a discursive form capable of constructing a coherent model of the world in its own image. It is a language, that is, a lexicon and style, but it is also a system of the imagination and a grammar of things" (1994, 132). Over the past two decades Ovidian scholarship has abandoned seeking the essential generic identity of a literary work and has shifted instead to examining the interaction of genres within a poem—in other words, functionalism, rather than ontology.¹ Innovating upon Richard Heinze's work on Ovid's poetry, Stephen Hinds in his Metamorphosis of Persephone spearheads some of the most successful studies of Ovid by investigating the generic dynamics of epic and elegy, not as metrical forms, but as the discourses associated with these forms. Inspired by these scholars' works, I shall consider Claudian's reception and deployment of classical generic poetics within the changed configurations of literary genres in the fourth century in a few selected passages of the De raptu Proserpinae.

Since much of Claudian's corpus is political poetry or propaganda, scholars have focused more on his historical significance than on his literary achievement.² A subject of recent scholarly interest, the unfinished epic De raptu on the abduction and marriage of Proserpina stands out from Claudian's corpus as an endeavor motivated largely by his literary ambition to treat an important myth that had never been told in a separate epic.³ As such, this poem offers a unique chance for an analysis focused on the literary complexity of a doctus poeta who interacts with the tradition of Roman epic poetry in terms of topoi, narrative, and genre.⁴ A self-conscious imitator of his epic predecessors, Claudian succeeds in transferring, and transforming, an abundance of literary motifs through which he engages the generic dynamics historically deriving from the fruitful experimentation of the Augustan poets.⁵ But in certain respects, Claudian departs significantly from earlier epicists, for the fourth century in which he wrote was a period of generic instability that saw the reshaping of classical genres and the emergence of new poetic forms. In this context we must remember a central idea of Hans Robert Jauss: literary genres are not normative (ante rem) or classificatory (post rem) but historical (in re), "in a continuity in which each earlier genre even furthers and supplements itself through the later one."⁶ Functionalism must be tempered with a diachronically responsive approach that accounts for the evolving horizon of expectation.

If by Claudian's time a certain amount of force still remained in the classical epic despite its furcation into genres like the panegyric epic, the cento epic, and the biblical epic, the same cannot be said of elegy, the genre of servitium amoris that had not been practiced since the first century c.e. Indeed, if the erotic discourse of elegy in De raptu intrudes upon the martial discourse of the epic à la Ovid to destabilize the authority built upon the latter, it is mediated at times through the hexameter epithalamium that serves as the generic counterpart to the mediating figure of Proserpina in the narrative. In this paper, I first revisit the opening scene of the Underworld, a passage in which Stephen Wheeler detects borrowings from the epic tradition that mark the poem as a tale about preservation of cosmic order. This scene engages with the epithalamium as well, providing the first clue about how the first two books of De raptu are framed generically. In section 2, I offer a reading of the subsequent scene, the Embassy of the Fates, which subverts Pluto's power by creating an elegiac moment, thereby dissuading Pluto from launching a Gigantomachic war. The purpose of the embassy—to bend (flectere) Pluto's will by offering a bride (Proserpina, as Zeus later decides)—leads to section...