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8. Allusion from the Broad, Well-Trodden Street: The Odyssey in Inscribed and Literary Epigram
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Allusion from the Broad, Well-Trodden Street THE ODYSSEY IN INSCRIBED AND LITERARY EPIGRAM Around 1980, in the hometown of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, a large billboard raised prominently above State Street advertised the merits of Miller Lite. Lite beer was at that time a relatively new product—Miller had introduced it into the American market just a couple of years earlier, in 1977—and perhaps advertising strategies were not yet as relentlessly geared to a young, single, sports-oriented, pleasure-seeking audience as they are today. But even then, this particular billboard stood out as something unusual. Drawing on a painting of the year 1787 by J. H. W. Tischbein, it portrayed the German poet Goethe, age thirty-eight, reclining on some lowlying blocks from an ancient ruin in the landscape of Campania during his italienische Reise. He is elegantly clad in a flowing cream-colored cape, covering stylish knickerbockers, white hose, and black shoes; on his head, he sports a dapper broad-brimmed hat, which he wears at a rakish tilt. Altogether the painting encapsulates the image of the cosmopolitan dandy of the Enlightenment, drinking deep of the rich cultural elixir of the Italian countryside. What was novel in the Ann Arbor billboard, however, was that its artist waggishly altered the poet’s outstretched arm in the original 147 chapter 8 Fig. 5. J. H. W. Tischbein, Goethe in the Campagna, 1786–87, Frankfurt a. M., Städelsches Kunstinstitut. (Courtesy of Städel Museum/ARTOTHEK.) 148 The Scroll and the Marble painting, raising it up and placing in its hand a mug of beer. Further, coming from the poet’s mouth were now the words “More Lite!” Billboards are characteristically among the more lowly instruments of American commerce: set on the busy highway and hawking their wares to the fleeting throng, they tend to keep their message simple and blunt. Here, however, one really wonders what the marketing department of Miller Breweries was thinking, since this one seems to expect something more of its target audience. In the first place, simply to recognize that this is Goethe entails a considerable degree of cultural literacy on the part of prospective viewers. And unless the onlooker can identify this figure, he will be unable to grasp a further and still more learned transaction. For the phrase “More Lite” is an allusion, playing on Goethe’s dying words, “Mehr Licht!”—an ambiguous utterance, which has itself provoked a raft of scholarly exegesis. Thus we find a most recondite literary allusion embedded in a strikingly humble public medium. In the field of Hellenistic poetry, learned allusion has of course been a [44.221.43.88] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:35 GMT) Allusion from the Broad, Well-Trodden Street 149 staple of scholarly investigation for more than a century, especially as it is deployed by such elite authors as Aratus, Apollonius of Rhodes, Callimachus , and Theocritus. Here it is viewed as one of the hallmarks of refined Hellenistic artistry. In this essay, I will try to add a new perspective to this topic by extending the scope of discussion to include allusion even in Gebrauchspoesie, or utilitarian verse—that is, in the anonymous verse inscriptions known as epigram that lined the broad, well-trodden streets and public spaces of Greek cities, even as billboards do in our own time. Specifically, I will probe the popular limits of allusion by examining epigraphic references to the Odyssey to see whether they are qualitatively different in inscribed epigram from those found in its literary counterpart. By so doing, I hope to delineate a spectrum of readership and readerly expectation concerning allusion, from the simplest to the most challenging. In this regard, the Ann Arbor ad may be helpful. For it raises a number of questions that can be fruitful for us in dealing with erudite allusion in Hellenistic poetry. First is that ever thorny question of authorial intent: What did the author want? Or in the case of our billboard, what purpose would an allusion to Goethe serve in the advertising campaign of Miller Breweries? Second, to what extent does context (here the very location of the billboard in a particular place) determine the character of the allusion we are likely to find? That is, does the physical setting of performance and reception matter in determining just how demanding an allusion will probably be (how broad the range of sources it draws on, how familiar or obscure the sources, how...