True Names: Vergil and the Alexandrian Tradition of Etymological Wordplay. By JAMES J. O'HARA. University of Michigan Press, 1996, Pp. xviii + 320.

Extremus Labor: Vergils 10. Ekloge und die Poetik der Bucolica. By LORENZ RUMPF. Hypomnemata 112. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996. Pp. 312.

Although different in origin and result--the seasoned Vergilian engineering a tool destined to enjoy wide use and the dissertation writer engaged in rarified exploration--, each of the above works indicates prior scholarly stages it surpassed and yet necessitates further developments beyond the stage attained here.

Readers of Vergil will thank O'Hara for a careful and compendious achievement. To scholars he pays the respect of acknowledging and building on their work, taking etymological study to a new stage of authority and utility through frank engagement with a broad community of researches and schools. Although eschewing self-important claims to the effect, the result is comprehensive. It should give this field new currency among readers.

Showing consideration for varying needs, O'Hara first surveys "Etymological Thinking and Wordplay before Vergil" (from Greek poets of the archaic, classical, and Hellenistic periods, through Greek philosophers, to Republican Romans): welcome as a reminder if not an initiation. On Vergil he identifies 14 features of etymological wordplay and for each provides ample illustrations, which help the definition to sink in. He goes on to argue that the poet used etymologizing both to stake out a literary position and to reinforce broad themes, notably those of origin and cause.

The ensuing catalogue of etymologies (pp. 115-292) follows a regular and clear format: the passage at issue; the "wordplay or possible wordplay" discussed, compared, assayed, often with citation of other scholarship; ancient scholarly and literary testimony for the derivation; ancient parallels; bibliographical references. The generosity of reporting holds particular value for anyone working without a research library.

O'Hara brings etymological study to a new stage, yet remains uneasy. He can write of telling "actual examples of etymological wordplay from specious examples found by the overlydiligent searches of investigators like me" (p. 57, emphases added), or apologize for "cheating" when he underlines a link between words, or remark that "ancient authors were more prone to suggest that two etymologies are both true than our modern way of approaching etymology is willing to accept" (p. 12, emphases added). The "ancient"/"modern" dichotomy would yield at a further stage, I suspect, to more supple appreciation of ancients (like Varro and elegists) who explore manifold varieties as a way of getting at all the powers, say, and implications of a god (this as yet dim glimpse of a next stage comes from unpublished work on Varro by Stephen Hinds, one who accepts and theorizes multiplicity). Traditional scholarship is hard put to herd phenomena that range from overtly etymological points to the paronomastic undertow that sometimes seems to relate anything to anything else: a latitude variously cosmic and comic (shades of Cratylus). That way lurk further toils of theory and Methode: at this stage, O'Hara merits praise for the bird already in hand.

A different sort of alarm went off for me at the following: "Both the Aeneid and to some extent the Georgics are poems of origins, works that wrestle with the question of what the (Roman) world is like, and how it got that way." To be sure, I thought, the Aeneid leads off with etiological themes--"primus...fato profugus...mihi causas memora" (A. I 1, 2, 8)--, not to mention local names of fame, while the Georgics build to their etiological climax--"prima repetens ab origine" (G. 4, 286). But why leave out the Bucolics? In the first two eclogues paired etiologies establish the program for the book: claiming Roman myth and power through the young god's oracle to Tityrus, "deus nobis haec otia fecit...mihi responsum primus dedit ille" (B. I 7, 44), then adding the literary complement, myth of bucolic origin and formula of particular succession within the genre, "Pan primum...'te nunc habet ista secundum'" (B. II 32, 38).

Etiological themes then proliferate and reach out, from "ab Ioue principium...Iouis omnia plena" (B. III 60, 61) to the ensuing burst. B. IV unfurls its new age etiology, from the iron race exchanged for the golden ("primum | desinet...surget" 8, 9) to the reach for universality, "omnia" (52) and challenge to poetic origins at a new poetic stage ("Pan etiam Arcadia" 58, 59). The new mythology gets synthesized in B. V ("'deus, deus ille'" 60) producing a formula--"damnabis tu quoque uotis" (80)--that will serve again for Augustus (G. I 42, A. I 290). To be sure, the expansive thrust gets modulated in B. VI, initiating the negative etiologies of the second halfbook (shades of Otis). But O'Hara would surely agree that Vergil already in the Bucolics was thinking etiologically as he played off divers forces and sources shaping his world and his art.

Rumpf at least, with "die Poetik der Bucolica" would give etiology its due, I thought, looking at the methodical design of his dissertation (University of Frankfurt am Main, 1995), which promises review of scholarship, step-by-step analysis of the tenth eclogue, and synthesis of the implicit poetic of the Bucolics, fleshed out with a bibliography and three indexes--citations of ancient writers (Vergil, others), modern scholars, names and things.

For scholarly "Meilensteine," Rumpf picks Skutsch (Franz not Otto), Leo, Snell, Klingner, Putnam, Conte and Schmidt (Ernst A.). After skimming analysis and biography, at the "geisteswissenschaftliche Tradition," Rumpf seconds Schmidt for censuring Snell's sentimental-idyllic equation of Arcadia with the entire bucolic world. Putnam, as the most comprehensive voice of the American school, wins approbation for his view of the poet's development in B. X but reproach for his undialectical notion of elegy defeating bucolic. Nor does Conte's standoff between stereotyped bucolic and elegiac genres satisfy, since elegy after all in B. X speaks only through the mouth of the framing bucolic poet.

Schmidt wins praise for rejecting historic misreadings, exposing allegories, denouncing the busy promoters of Vergil as Epicurean, and projecting a rigorous general theory: genre defined as poetry that varies on prior poetry of which it conserves defining marks: bucolic genre marked by making song about herdsmen making song about herdsmen, employing the meter of heroic song while self-consciously abjuring heroics, so always engaged in self-reflection that reaches beyond the bucolic proper to grasp at poetry itself.

Proposing a stage beyond Schmidt, Rumpf posits a further mark of bucolic poetics (p. 71): bucolic singing in the foreground always represented as based on some other context, which is imagined between the fictive foreground and the reader. In other words, the bucolic foreground gets represented as existing with respect to a suggested Rahmen ('housing, casement, frame', cf. the verb rahmen 'to encase, frame' but also 'form cream; skim cream off': metaphors to conjure with). Such heady abstractions find little favor in anglophone philology, yet the approach has a certain explorative and intellective power, if anyone, if some intrigued reader take the trouble to apply it to the situation of just about any eclogue.

Rumpf next devotes pp. 73-200 to reading step-by-step with an approach he styles controlled naiveté. Both typical and crucial for everything else is how he handles 'Arethusa' (B. X 1): identified as a Sicilian spring-nymph and interpreted as a female Gestalt. But then Vergil alludes to her vicissitudes: (4-5)

His evidence arrives in a rambling footnote (16 on p. 81), which states that in the myth's surviving versions 'as a rule' ("in der Regel") Alpheus goes undersea to get Arethusa in Sicily. Rumpf merely marvels that Vergil substitutes for the rushing, pursuing male the unsullied, imperiled, fresh-water-female.

A more systematic approach (representing a more modern stage of myth criticism) would resemble, for instance, Peter Wiseman, in Remus. A Roman Myth (Cambridge University Press 1995), who assembles mythic evidence as fully as possible, sorts it by variants and chronology, and attributes variants to their producers' divergent interests and times.

Rumpf should cite the evidence of Servius on B. X 4: "varia enim opinio est" introducing two main variants: that Alpheus left Elis to go to a Sicilian nymph, or that Arethusa became a spring and fled from Elis to Sicily. The Alpheus variants are mostly earlier and Greek, implying a political subtext of relations between motherland and colony, which Rumpf fully reports, only to slight the Arethusa variants and their subtext.

The Arethusa variant occurs first of course in B. X, where Vergil emphasizes her flight and thus Arcadian origin, as also in the fullest example, which opens with queries about cause--"quae tibi causa fugae, cur sis, Arethusa, sacer fons" (Ovid, M. V 572-641: line numbers only in Rumpf; cf. Ovid's allusion to Arethusa as 'Arcadian maid', A. III 6:30). [[1]] The subtext for the etiology in Ovid is erotic. Vergil makes a further point, by casting the flight into the future ("subterlab--re," apparently not scanned as future tense by Rumpf). So Vergil thus imagines himself and 'Arethusa' in Arcadia before her flight, when she has still to risk the salt.

Vergil's version implies three subtexts, one erotic (exploited by Ovid), that Arcadian tradition includes disparity in love, as does elegy. [[2]]  A second subtext relates the etiology in B. X to the other Arcadian motifs in the eclogue book. Rumpf merely counts the motifs (p. 124, n. 103), but one of his frame analyses would reveal them shifting step-by-step towards the bucolic foreground from various background levels (cf. "aus mehreren Schichten" p. 71): e.g. generic invention by Pan represented as distant past (B. II); Pan's authority represented as the object of distant future challenge (B. IV); Arcadian singers represented as remembered in Italy remembering actual verses in competition (B. VII); actual Arcadian verses represented as remembered in Arcadia (B. VIII: 'Maenalus always hears [present] herdsman loves and Pan, who invented [past] pipes'). In this framework, the Arethusa etiology caps a progress and sets the keynote for the climactic representation of Arcadia in the book.

The third subtext, then, regards Greek bucolic tradition, which placed Arethusa in Sicily. By featuring her flight, Vergil underlines that Sicily is secondary to Arcadia and thus implies that Greek bucolic is less than his, since he has made it back to the source. He drives home his point by upstaging the Sicilian Daphnis of Theocritus with the Roman 'Gallus' to generate an elegiaco-dramatic fantasy of the original locus: Rumpf well interprets the forlorn 'Gallus' as a figure from outside engaged to embroider an ideal 'Arcadia' for Vergil (pp. 128, 135, 243, 250; at p. 128, Rumpf has no time for R. Jenkyns, JRS 79, 1989, pp. 26-39, who finds Vergil's Arcadia negligible). Vergil makes Arcadia into a place of imagination and puts it on the literary map, thereby overshadowing Theocritus and transmuting Greek bucolic into Latin pastoral tradition.

Besides the Arcadian motifs, other unsorted lists would benefit from discriminating frame analysis. A long note (p. 76) identifies song as the central subject of the Bucolics (I underline the static and reductive concept), then illustrates the abstraction by merely listing instances of carmina, although they might differ from one another in a systematic way, might, for example, unfold diverse poetic conditions, programs, powers, and effects. Likewise Rumpf lists merely numerous examples of the Orphic power of song (p. 87), with no sense of varying situation. He closes the whole interpretive section by quoting a chatty note on the poem's last line: capellae 13 times in the eclogues, "blend of the poetic and the familiar that is so typical of these poems" (pp. 199-200: R. G. M. Nisbet, PVS 20, 1991, pp. 2-3). Although nice on prosody and placement, tone, this only underscores Rumpf's penchant for the abstract, since frame analysis would reveal that a motif like 'she goats' recurs and varies for complex sense.

The final section opens with a familiar litany: B. X poetological, basic structures appearing again and again throughout eclogue book, implicit poetics aimed at poetry overall, single concept of poetics in book, need to improve on Schmidt by distinguishing between the 'framing' and the 'framed'.

In spite of yearning for a new interpretive stage, Rumpf next proceeds to erect his entire Poetik on an old interpretive base. He not merely accepts but insists and protests that odd-numbered and even-numbered eclogues differ with system and significance: easily shown, he says, since the odd all represent bucolic figures directly, while the even represent them framed by the "Dichter-instanz" (AKA "the eclogue poet").

Yet the odd-even dichotomy always stumbles and proves irrelevant to Vergil's project because the even B. VI and odd B. VII both share the same mixed narrative-dramatic form: in both a narrator (Rumpf's "Dichter-instanz") relays poetry presented as deriving from other persons, places, times (frames in Rumpf's terms). How these narrative fictions pair up would be a fine topic for frame analysis (getting the mind into the respective, stagily differentiated backgrounds supplied for the narrator 'Tityrus' in B. VI and his old acquaintance 'Meliboeus', the complementary narrator in B. VII). That, however, would propel frame analysis itself to a new stage: freed of mechanistic preconceptions, forced to trade up to principles like dialectical opposition and succession, and so enabled to engage the text with the hermeneutic drive that endears Rumpf even when his abstractions are spinning their wheels.

To Rumpf's credit, he sought leverage to move a field that too often seems closed to intellectual change. The break with biographical allegory for poetic self-reflection and the project of frame analysis are constructive, if only his steps were not impeded by assumptions from prior stages like 'central significance', 'general poetic', and 'even/odd'. To get to a new stage, Rumpf would have to focus on the particular significance of each piece in its place in the sequence of the eclogue book: take the examples noted earlier of successive and complementary etiologies in the first two eclogues, then the etiological increments building up to the fourth eclogue and rounded off in the fifth, or the retrospective and complementary etiologies that open the second halfbook by bringing back and modulating figures of the first half: 'Tityrus' rebuffed and relaunched in restricted terms (B. VI), then 'Meliboeus' recalled to discriminate between restrictive and expansive poetics (B. VII). The new focus would let each particular situation and etiology, whether supplementing or revising what precedes, contribute its particular values to an articulated and unfolding poetics. Such a reading might also recover the impact of the Bucolics staged (ignored by Rumpf): their performance propagating the public myth that incorporates the persona of the poet as uates--public and prophetic bard. [[3]]

.

Ovid by spelling out the etiological implication that has eluded many of Vergil's readers handles mythology as he does etymology: see O'Hara's supplement to his book, "Vergil's Best Reader? Ovidian Commentary on Vergilian Etymological Wordplay," CJ 91.3 (1996) 255-76, especially p. 256 on "complex examples in which Ovid calls attention to aspects of Vergil's text that many have missed."

Thus Vergil's second request to Arethusa (6), incipe, sollictos Galli dicamus amores, implies a subtle emphasis, "help me tell the troubled loves of Gallus now, since you will have some too."

The interpretive stage thus sketched, as some readers of Classical Journal will be aware, has roots in the text-specific reasoning I explored in The Design of Virgil's Bucolics (Roma: Ateneo 1978). I worked from conventional reading up to poetic self-reflection, which I came to see as inherent in the situation of each eclogue, so that each played its role in the progress to a new stage of bucolic tradition (B. X), which was prefaced by the vision of a new epic stage (B. IV). I went on to work out the detailed analysis of structural models and dynamics that appeared as "Le Bucoliche. 11. La Struttura," Enciclopedia Virgiliana I (1984) 549-552, with its supplement, "Strutture interne di singole egloghe nel libro bucolico di Virgilio," Maia 35 (1983) 205-212. The latter somewhat austere and no doubt abstract considerations were fleshed out through a mode of reading that bears comparison with frame analysis in Fulbright lectures for the Vergil Bimillennium at Rome University "La Sapienza," eventually published as Poesia e potere. Il mitoVirgilio (Roma: Laterza 1986). Most recently I argued for a new stage of attention to the Liber Bucolicon in "A Review Article: The End of the Eclogues," Vergilius 41 (1995) 1-25, regarding Wendell Clausen, A Commentary on Virgil's Eclogues (Oxford 1994). Looking back, now, it strikes me how each of us, I mean the poet, the reviewed, and the reviewer, sought new stages in our respective fields. The striving will no doubt not end here, if only others take up the torch, eager to upstage even matters such as these.
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