A Corner Acrostic in Juvenal, Lucan, and Cicero: How Excited Should We Be?
(2014) Les mots sous les mots — Location: Fondation Hardt, Geneva, Switzerland
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- Abstract
- This paper studies one special kind of acrostic that has often been viewed as a particularly powerful candidate for authenticity and intentionality, the so-called “gamma” 4 or “corner” acrostic, whereby the acrostic is formed exactly or nearly by the first letter of the first word of a horizontal line of poetry. This paper begins by arguing for the presence of a corner acrostic on the word haec in Juvenal’s programmatic first Satire, showing how this acrostic can be seen as entwining Juvenal’s poem with its Horatian predecessor, and with Lucan and Cicero, who employ the exact same acrostic in their own poetry. Because of the commonality and banality of the word involved, this paper pushes boundaries of acrostic interpretation, as it were, to the breaking point. One of the problems with the study of classical acrostics is that it has proceeded in a mostly piecemeal fashion. Hilberg’s monumental collection of “accidental acrostics” doubtless contains a number of acrostics that some might consider “genuine,” but it has made clear that not all acrostics seem intentional or can be easily incorporated into the “meaning game” of literary interpretation.5 This paper concludes, therefore, by questioning the value of its earlier “pushing,” making use of a computer program that was designed by Samuel Kachuck (Wesleyan University), to detect all corner acrostics in all of the major poets of the Latin corpus. The presence of a large number of “false positives,” that is, of corner-acrostics that do not seem to “bear meaning,” should make us think twice before jumping to pre-contextual conclusions about the intentionality of any given acrostic. In the end, it is up to readers to decide whether the haec case, and others like it, seems in its various contextual relationships to be a candidate for authenticity.
- Affiliations
Princeton University Princeton University
Citations
Kachuck, A. (2014). A Corner Acrostic in Juvenal, Lucan, and Cicero: How Excited Should We Be? Les mots sous les mots, Fondation Hardt, Geneva, Switzerland. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/101084