Odd Pasts

Afternoons like this remind me both of why I loved the Classics and why I gave up teaching it. Although I am not sure whether Cicero had any knowledge of Aristotle's ideas (at least not in the form that we received them - they turn up in the Eastern branch of the Roman Empire in the tenth century, via Arab sources), he has the same habit as the master. He can't help putting everything into categories, making 'poetry' a subdivision of rhetoric (already a division of moral education and... and...).

Even Horace, whom I love to distraction because it is never clear whether he is trying to be a good citizen of Augustan Rome or a cheeky subversive - gets in on the act when he discourses on poetry. It's all divided up.

I claim to be a Platonist simply because I get frustrated at all the tick-boxes the ancients indulged. I do get quite confused when they start enumerating the ways that a subject can be dissected. I also find it ironic that writers use a system that is easier to communicate through illustration. My notes on the position of poetry are more comprehensible than the original texts, just because I did them as a spider map.

So - the love is that the world that the Romans saw was obviously so different. That Cicero could try and put poetry under rhetoric and that Horace squeezed it in under grammar tells me more about how they regarded the written word. I can roughly switch the terms (Cicero had poetry as a moral matter, Horace made if formal), but that's not exact. The entire Matrix of the Roman world, even as it shifted from Republic to Empire, is fundamentally different to mine and the twenty-first century's version. That's not just a matter of adding time and ideas. The foundations are different.

And that's why I didn't like to teach it. I am not sure that's entirely useful but...