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Jerome Lectures 2002 In early October we hosted the Jerome lecturer for 2003, Alessandro Barchiesi, Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Siena at Arezzo and Stanford University. Oddly enough, this was the first time in the long history of the Jerome lectures that they were given by a literary scholar. Barchiesi, who is known for his literary critical work on the Augustan poets and especially on Ovid, gave a series of four lectures and a Saturday morning seminar for the graduate students, all characterized by his discerning blend of literary and cultural criticism. A student of Gianbiagio Conte of the University of Pisa, whose sensitive rhetorical readings of allusion in Latin poetry began to influence many Latinists outside of Italy in the 1980s and stimulated the searching interest in allusion that has distinguished the field in the past two decades, Barchiesi began his career with a book on the Homeric models of Virgil's Aeneid. Since then he has attempted to broaden the study of allusion in Latin poetry, insisting that when we look at a poet's reworking of an earlier poet's words, we must attend as much to the ideological content as to the verbal interplay of sameness and difference and the more strictly aesthetic impications of the borrowing. This is particularly important in the case of Latin poets, who not only were echoing Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic Greeks (that is, the voices of a conquered culture), but were seldom born in Rome themselves, usually coming (like Catullus, Virgil, and Ovid) from the upper classes of Italian cities that had been granted Roman citizenship only recently. Barchiesi likewise insists that our study of other formal features, like viewpoint, take into account such matters as the gender, ethnicity, and social status of the narrative voices that produce them. Thus in his lectures he read Augustan poetry against its social and political background, invoking for his audience Augustus' conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt, the new Roman artistic and architectual program, Roman religion, and the book trade and mechanics of writing and publication. Such cultural readings, of course, on Barchiesi's interpretation, can accommodate the poet's influence on his culture as much as the cultural influences on the poetry. In addition to the Saturday morning seminar, Professor Barchiesi met with the graduate students over lunch several times. His lectures well fitted the Department's current effort to strengthen our Latin program, and provided a stimulating new perspective, particularly for the students who are interested in literary studies. |
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