| Popis: |
This chapter discusses what Roman rhetoricians said about the imitation of authors. After a brief discussion of Dionysius of Halicarnassus it moves on to consider the central texts of the rhetorical tradition: the Ad Herennium, Cicero’s various discussions of the topic, Seneca’s 84th Epistle, (centrally) Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, and finally the Peri Hypsōs ascribed to Longinus. The chapter shows how these discussions of imitatio rely heavily on metaphors—of biological reproduction, or digestion, or the development of an active body—to describe the successful imitation of one author by another, and frequently oppose those metaphors to their negative images—mere pictorial representations or simulacra. The chapter explains why these metaphors, which were to have an extensive afterlife, were used. It is intrinsically hard to describe how one person acquires a skill from another, and Latin lacked a technical vocabulary in which to do so. Roman rhetoricians transferred the direct and personal exemplary relationship between a trainee orator and his master to textual relationships. As a result they were prone to represent the process by which a pupil assimilated his reading in bodily terms. Quintilian in particular stressed aspects of earlier writers which were products of an ingenium or natural talent that was inimitable. This combination of conceptual fuzziness and metaphorical richness made imitatio a potent literary resource, and indeed later concepts of poetic genius are adumbrated by the ‘inimitable’ qualities of the exemplary orator. |
