The amount of criticism heaped upon persuadent has obscured consideration of the meaning of picta; for it is this word which carries the weight of the line. Tracing the sequence of thought in the passage will show where the emphasis lies. There is throughout a comparison, either expressed, or implied, between the artless manifestations of nature and their cultivated, trained, or man-made counterparts; ‘wild flowers are more beautiful to behold than cultivated ones; similarly ivy and arbutus which grow as they (...) will are more attractive than those in gardens; natural rills more charming than artificial fountains, … birds which sing from the heart delight us more than those which have been taught.’. (shrink)

In this paper I shall be examining the nature and provenance of what many people state or imply to be a traditional, conventional, even trite figure of speech: the Augustan Elegists' figure of the ‘seruitium amoris’’. It is indeed a very frequent image in the Elegists. As. F. O. Copley says: ‘Of all the figures used by the Roman elegists, probably none is quite so familiar as that of the lover as slave.’’ But frequency does not equal triteness nor traditionality.

In these studies of Latin poetry Niall Rudd demonstrates a variety of critical methods and approaches. He shows how it can be fruitful at different times to consider the historical background of a poem, its language or structure, its place in a literary tradition, the role of critical paradigms, and so on. But if no single approach has special and invariable authority this does not imply critical anarchy. Each has its own validity for different purposes, its own strengths and limitations. (...) The reader must be versatile and sensitive to a range of possibilities, but not doctrinaire. (shrink)