.h "ONE: \f7POEMA QVA POEMA\f6"

.bl
Mr. Wilde's verses belong to a class which is the special terror of reviewers,
the poetry which is neither good nor bad, which calls for neither praise nor ridicule,
and in which we search in vain for any personal touch of thought or music.
.br
.ad r
\f7Saturday Review\f6, 23 July 1981, lii, 118.
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.ad b
.ck 

The \f7Bellum Civile\f6 is almost universally identified as a mediocre poem.
If taken as some kind of comment on Lucan's \f7Pharsalia\f6,
it could be intended as either a parodic travesty
or an exemplary improvement upon that poet:
but the poem is ``neither bad enough nor so absurdly flawed
as to rank as out-and-out parody or burlesque
nor yet good enough to be taken as [a model] of superior composition.''\|\c
.\``fails both as a parody and in its own right;
.\for despite some remarkable internal felicities of phrasing and effect
.\and one extremely forceful speech, the poem is unmistakably mediocre
.\and its structure weak and rambling.''\c
.f "Beck (1979) 241, cf. Arrowsmith (1959) 209."
If the poem is understood as an honest attempt on the part of Petronius,
then he is to be excused ``as a writer whose regular \f7métier\f6 …
was as far as possible from epic poetry'',\c
.f "Baldwin (1911) 35."
and if understood as contributing to the characterization of the poet figure,
then it is a ``deliberately mediocre [composition] which reflect[s] Eumolpus'
mediocre talents.''\|\c
.f "Walsh (1970) 95."
Each of these arguments relies on the assumption that the \f7Bellum Civile\f6
is a poetic specimen of only middling literary merit,
yet the justification of that assumption is often either missing or inadequate.
Part of the aim of the present study is to provide more comprehensive
documentation of the evidence for the poem's literary value.
.p
Perhaps one reason that the quality of the \f7Bellum Civile\f6 is so rarely,
and then only briefly, addressed
is that assessing a poem's quality is not at all straightforward.
There is really no objective way of doing it.
In the case of the \f7Bellum Ciuile\f6 the problem is compounded
by a difference in language and the intervention of some two thousand years.
Any interpretation of the poem inevitably involves a degree of comparison.
Eumolpus presets the reader's expectations
by mentioning Homer, Vergil, and Horace before reciting the poem (118.5),
but who is to say that these are the appropriate comparison
for what he goes on to recite?
If the aim is to come to as objective an appreciation
of the \f7Bellum Ciuile\f6 as possible,
then Eumolpus' preceding comments must be ignored for the time being.
The impulse to adduce a ``comparison text''
must also be suppressed, at least for the moment.
But even when a poem is isolated from its context
and from the literary environment in which it was produced,
assessing its quality is no less difficult,
for a good poem is more than merely the sum of its parts.
One cannot call a poem ``good'' simply by pointing out
that it is made up of sufficient features which are somehow ``poetic''
(a particular diction, use of imagery, metrical effects, rhetorical effects, &c.),
and yet every good poem has at least some of these ``poetic'' features.
Before reciting the \f7Bellum Civile\f6,
Eumolpus himself brings this to the attention of his audience
on the point of language and metre:
.bl

\f7multos ... carmen decepit;
nam ut quisque versum pedibus instruxit
sensumque teneriorem verborum ambitu intexuit,
putavit se con-tinuo\ in\ Heliconem\ venisse\f6. (118.1)\p

.ck
The casting of refined thought into perfect verse
does not in itself a good poem make;
and yet every good poem, at least in the ancient world,
does make use of fine ideas, and does scan well.
On the other hand it is very easy to spot a few detriments
such as bad metre, tired cliché, and loose structure,
and from those, unless sufficient good qualities admit an
``even Homer nods''-type defence, conclude that the poem is terrible.
Indeed, even if it were possible to develop an objective judgement
of a poem's worth by identifying certain good and bad features,
this may still not be enough.
One may, as Eumolpus does,
hold a Vergil or a Horace up as a model of good poetry;
but no one considers the schoolboy's imitation,
however good an imitation it may be,
anywhere near as good a poem as the original.
An imitation in the end is just that;
for a poem to be appreciated in its own right
it must be capable of standing on its own merits.
.p
As mentioned above, the appreciation of this poem in particular
is complicated by its presentation:
it follows on from a discussion of how poetry ought to be written,
and, more generally, it is a poem delivered by a fictional poet character
within a large and unstructured prose frame.
It will be as well to ignore this complication for the time being,
in order to first gain a very basic grasp of the quality of the poem.
For the purpose of the first chapter of the present work,
which is to evaluate the poem as objectively as is possible,
the \f7Bellum Ciuile\f6 will therefore be considered in isolation;
the implications of the poem's context are considered in the chapters which follow.
.p
Indeed, this poem ought to be able to bear consideration on its own merits:
it is after all presented, like no other verse in the \f7Satyricon\f6,
as a poem in its own right.
Most of the of the verse that appears in the work is presented
as scraps, snippets, or quotations.
Even the character who is a self proclaimed poet (\f7ego … poeta sum\f6, 83.8)
rarely delivers complete compositions.
Rather, Eumolpus uses verse in the course of ordinary conversation (83.10, 93.2)
and, like Trimalchio at the \f7Cena\f6 (34.10, 55.3),
composes in a symposium setting, \f7e tempore\f6,
at the reconciliatory celebrations on board Lichas' ship (109.9–10).
The \f7Troiae Halosis\f6 (89),
the second longest poem in the \f7Satyricon\f6 as it survives,
is also construed as the product of extemporizing, if Encolpius really was
\f7totum in illa haerere tabula quae Troiae halosin ostendit\f6;
for Eumolpus could not have known beforehand that this would be the case.
This does not of course preclude a ready-made composition,
but it is a composition whose subject matter is tied to the frame-story's narrative.
The \f7Bellum Ciuile\f6, on the other hand, comes almost from nowhere.
The reason for the poem itself is related to the frame-story's narrative
(it serves to while away the long journey to Croton)
but there is no reason this must be a poem on the Civil War.
Because the \f7Bellum Ciuile\f6 is presented as a poem in its own right,
with an independently selected subject matter,
it ought to bear at least a first pass appreciation in isolation from its context.
The difficulties of an objective appreciation have already been mentioned.
A good poem is more than the sum of its parts;
nevertheless it may be useful to anatomize those parts.
Such an analysis follows, in respect of several of the \f7Bellum Ciuile\f6's
poetic attributes.