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Denis Feeney. Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016. xii + 377 pp. Cloth, $35.00.
The history of Latin literature has often been reconstructed under the influence of a celebrated dictum of Horace (Epist. 2.1.156): "Graecia capta had conquered her Roman conquerors," inasmuch as she had imposed her own culture upon them. Looking carefully at this formulation, we see the subtle jesting of a poet who wants to exaggerate matters provocatively and puts on a modest appearance out of taste for paradox. In fact, Horace knew only too well that the entire history of Roman culture, from at least the third century but perhaps even before that, in spite of all the abrupt rejections by Quirites, proudly resistant to Hellenization, was not so much a history of Greek conquest or Roman subordination, as rather the story of a gradual process of appropriation, an active process that had brought the Romans to assimilate Greek culture to the point of transforming it into a new possession, that is, of putting together a new and original culture. If he had not wanted to color things with a dash of humor, if he had not inverted the real course by which an entire cultural process had been set afoot and had not in this way invented the showy wordplay that "the Roman conquerors had been defeated by those they defeated," Horace should have said exactly the opposite: the conquerors had been so victorious that they took for themselves everything, really everything, from Greece.
In the history of culture appropriation is inherently a creative act, a creation, even if it is mediated and realized by secondary means. We should even accept that appropriation is nothing but the inevitable means by which culture takes form as it grows by mere contact, by stealing, by derivation, and by elaborate imitation. We are in the habit of believing, according to a model drummed into us from our school days, that culture knows only narratives of influence, of invasion, and of superimposition, and we imagine that anyone who accepts culture from others in practice undergoes only external interference. That is not false, but it works only if the matter is viewed from one perspective and recipients are treated...