Re: Roman/Greek -- Mimetic Theory and Literary Study

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Date Posted: 10:27:01 04/06/08 Sun
Author: Jonathan Dunn
Subject: Re: Roman/Greek
In reply to: Katelyn R. 's message, "Roman/Greek" on 21:54:50 03/27/08 Thu

I would argue that the Romans are doing far more than "simply Romanizing" Greek literature. I would also argue that no one writes literature which isn't imitating older literature in some degree or another. The Romans may have imitated Greek literature. But it is a first degree imitation. Americans imitate British imitations of Roman imitations.

I'm not sure of the degree to which Romans imitate Greek style, at least in respect to language. Latin and Greek are very different languages; newer comparative grammars try to use Indo-European as a bridge between the two, relating the two languages by looking at their varying degrees of separation from IE. The imitation which does exist still requires a fundamental reworking of the language. The details are quite different. They may seem the same in translation, but that is only because the same people translate both.

For example, Virgil imitates Homer's meter. But Virgil is writing in a language with a stress accent and Homer in a language with a pitch accent. The conversion between these two different systems is much more than a matter of imitation. Latin and Greek meter sounds fundamentally different because it is fundamentally different. This isn't simply "imitation."

At the same time, the Roman grammarians imitated the vocabulary of the Greek grammarians and described their language as if it were a pitch accent. There is a back and forth here, I would argue, in which the Romans seem to imitate slavishly on the face of things while they are in fact doing something entirely unique and original.

It would be foolish, in other words, to dismiss the Romans because they imitated the Greeks. They do and they don't. It is more likely that everyone imitates the Greeks and the Romans are simply the best at doing it.

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