Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace (review)

Noting that "[t]he general concept . . . is not a radical innovation" but rather "a convenient new label for a familiar general idea," S. J. Harrison describes the focus of his book as follows: "I define 'generic enrichment' as the way in which generically identifiable texts gain literary depth and texture from detailed confrontation with, and consequent inclusion of elements from, texts which appear to belong to other literary genres" (1-2). His first chapter sets this concept against the backdrop of both classical and modern genre theory. On the classical side, he pays particular attention to Aristotle and Horace, noting the focus of both on the concept of to prepon and mentioning Horace's specific allusion to the mixing of genres in comedy and tragedy at Ars P. 93-98. In his section on modern theorists, Harrison draws on Alastair Fowler and Hans-Robert Jauss to help confront the fact that generic enrichment in classical literature rarely entails the complete acceptance of one genre by another; more often, to use Harrison's language, "a primary genre dominates but others appear in subordinate roles" (16). In dealing with such situations, he also uses what he calls the "metaphor of hospitality," speaking, for example, of "a 'guest' form" expanding "the 'host' form" in Vergil's Eclogue 10: "[L]ove-elegy is indeed not pastoral (and the love-poet Gallus thus symbolically renounces his supposed ambitions for the pastoral life by returning to it), but the pastoral book of the Eclogues, at its climactic point of closure, is expanded and indelibly enriched by imported elegiac material" (17).

Harrison suggests that though the concept of generic enrichment is relevant to other Roman poets, it is particularly applicable to Vergil and Horace, and he devotes the six remaining chapters of his book to detailed analysis of these two poets. Citing Stephen Hinds, Harrison emphasizes also that "intertextual issues are best tackled by the close consideration of particular texts" (16), and the bulk of these chapters offers detailed analysis of specific passages, as the following summary will suggest.

Chapter 2, on the Eclogues, focuses on three poems. In Eclogue 4, Harrison sees Vergil's use of materials from Sibylline prophecy and hexameter epithalamium as allowing him "to handle diplomatically a key political issue of the Triumviral period, how to flatter both Caesar/Augustus and Antony . . ." (40), his "hosting" of materials from epic panegyric in this same poem as foreshadowing "a future project for the pastoral poet"-i.e., the Aeneid (44). Harrison's discussion of Eclogue 10, as suggested above, focuses on Vergil's imaginative "hosting" of elegiac materials in a pastoral context. For me, the chapter's most intriguing portion was its discussion of ways in which Parthenius' Metamorphoses may have enriched Silenus' song in Eclogue 6.

Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted, respectively, to Horace's two earliest collections, Satires 1 and the Epodes. On Satires 1, Harrison notes that the very genre of Roman satire, with its ties to the lanx satura, combines with Lucilius' habit of using "elements from other literary genres freely" to afford Horace "double authorization for generic experiment and enrichment" (79). Harrison's promise that his "particular concern here will be to show how Satires 1 picks up the issue of generic enrichment put on the literary agenda by the recent appearance of the Eclogues" (76) seemed to me largely unfulfilled, for while Harrison comments on specific passages of Satires 1 where Horace draws on the Eclogues, he does not give the broader commentary on the relationship between the two collections that his words led me to expect. That said, the chapter has much to offer. Harrison's fine analysis of the Homeric echoes in both Satires 1.5 and 1.7 justifies his claim that these extensive allusions show how "the epic mode can enrich satiric literary texture" (91). Harrison's treatment of four familiar passages where Horace draws on Lucretius (Satires 1.1.24-26 and 117-21; 1.3.38-40 and...