Virgil’s Nomina Flexa: Tityrus, Amaryllis, Meliboeus
(2015) SCS Annual Meeting — Location: New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
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- Abstract
- In Virgil’s poetry, nomina are often omina: when Virgil describes Dido as errans, “wandering,” he is, as Ralph Hexter has reminded us, not only invoking one of his own favorite themes—exile—but also helping Dido fulfill, on the level of image and destiny, the fate inscribed in her Semitic name, ndd, the one who wanders. In Virgil’s poetry, too, nomina also form rococo structures: as Richard Thomas and Nicholas Horsfall have emphasized, in the Georgics, Virgil emblazons his patron in symmetrical positions in each book; perhaps this was meant to keep Maecenas’ name at the top of a column, but who knows? In the next twenty minutes, I will engage in an experiment that I call onomatologia, “telling stories through names,” using, as a case-study, Virgil’s first Eclogue. Taking step from the recent word-play research of Fred Ahl, Jim O’Hara, and others, aim to show that Virgil’s first three character-names—Tityrus, Amaryllis, Meliboeus—are what linguists like to call “talking, or, speaking, names,” that is, names that do things, that mean something, and not only as inert identifiers. In particular, I aim to show that these names do three particular things: 1) that they actively engage with the plot and moral debates of the first Eclogue; 2) that they adumbrate certain themes—shadows, exile, compassion, and conquest—that are at the center of Virgil’s career-long interests; and 3) that they play a role in structuring not only the Eclogues, but also the Georgics and the Aeneid.
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Princeton Princeton
Citations
Kachuck, A. (2015). Virgil’s Nomina Flexa: Tityrus, Amaryllis, Meliboeus. SCS Annual Meeting, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/101083