The Classical Tradition in Operation by Niall Rudd (review)

452 BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS NIALL RUDD. The Classical Tradition in Operation. The Robson Classical Lectures. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Pp. xii + 186. $55.00. ISBN: 0 8020 0570 5. In November 1992, the distinguished Latinist Niall Rudd returned from Bristol to the University of Toronto, where he had been on faculty from 1959 to 1968. He had been invited to deliver the third set of Robson Classical Lectures, a series established through a legacy from his former Toronto colleague, Donald Oakley Robson. This excellent book is an expanded version of those 1992 lectures, which studied the imitative treatment of Latin poetic models by English writers from Chaucer to Ezra Pound. Although he modestly describes himself as an amateur in the area of English poetry, Professor Rudd brings to the task a vast breadth of knowledge and experience in both classical and modern European literature. There are few other scholars alive who could write such a book-not, at least, with Rudd's assurance and panache. The volume consists of five discrete but parallel chapters, each exploring a deliberate process of creative imitation. First, Chaucer's depiction of Dido, in The House of Fame and The Legend of Good Women, is compared with her characterization in Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Heroides. Next, Rudd examines the relationship between Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors and Plautus' Menaechmi (discerning several other classical and biblical influences). Then Pope's Epistle to Augustus is contrasted with its avowed Horatian model, Epistle 2.1. There follows a sensitive reading of Tennyson's Lucretius, a chapter in which we are shown the intellectual kinship that the Victorian poet felt with his Roman counterpart. Finally, Rudd revisits a- celebrated battleground of comparative literature, offering new insights into Pound's Homage to Sextus Propertius. Although Rudd never tells us which group of readers he considers his main constituency, his book should be enjoyed equally by classicists with an interest in English literature and by English scholars eager to sharpen their understanding of the classical tradition. There is no hint of condescension towards either group: all readers are paid the compliment of assuming that they can follow a challenging comparative discourse at an intellectually rigorous level. Substantial footnotes and generous bibliographies are provided for those who wish to pursue any topic in greater depth. The close comparative method is shown to extremely good effect in the chapter on Pope and Horace ("Two Epistles to Augustus"). Given Rudd's stature as a Horatian critic and translator, that is no BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 453 surprise. Because the interpretation of both poems must depend on our view of the historical Augustus, Rudd first presents a balanced but essentially favourable appraisal of the Roman princeps; then he reviews the consistently positive image of Augustus as a rhetorical construct in Horace's poetry. Until quite recently, modern scholars assumed that the founder of the Roman Empire was benignly regarded during England's so-called "Augustan Age." However, in a revisionist study published in 1978, H.D. Weinbrot demonstrated that Augustus had in fact acquired a rather unsavoury reputation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. How might that attitude have affected Pope's interpretation of Horace's satire, and thus have coloured his ironic address to King George II? Rudd's conclusion, based on a careful marshalling of evidence and buttressed by effective quotation, is that Pope must surely have taken Horace's complimentary portrait of Augustus at its face value; by its very contrast, therefore, his own scandalous treatment of George II, with its underlying tone of "insolent mockery" (72), assumed much sharper point and wit. A considerable portion of this chapter is devoted to other theoretical concerns-in particular, the respective attitudes of Horace and Pope to their literary predecessors. It is all most engaging and informative. Since the appearance in 1964 of J.P. Sullivan's Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius, Latin scholars have learned to be more tolerant of Pound's eccentric approach to the Roman elegist, prepared even to recognize his Homage to Sextus Propertius as a genuine landmark in poetic criticism. So eloquent and persuasive was Sullivan's defence of this work...