Amy Richlin (UCLA) "How to Suppress a Homoerotic Classic: The Poems of Strato in Early Modern Europe"

Talk description:

Do we really need to know about every literary work that made it through the Middle Ages?  Greek epigrams have a surprisingly fraught history for such a slight genre.  The “Greek Anthology,” as it is known today, is a collection of collections:  some made in antiquity, some in Byzantium.  In the 1300s Maximus Planudes made an expurgated version which became the one best known in the western Renaissance.  It went on to great popularity, a model for poets in France and Italy. But in 1607 the 18-year-old Claude Saumaise rediscovered the unexpurgated Anthology in the Palatine Library at Heidelberg; we will look at the lively exchange of letters between Saumaise and his mentors as they debated whether to publish Book 12, Strato’s Musa Puerilis.  They never did.  150 years later we find the snarky media don Christian Klotz publishing a small selection, with his reasons why, as opposed to Johann Reiske, who had reasons why not.  In the 1790s Richard Brunck’s version was halted by his imprisonment during the Terror; it was not until 1814 that Friedrich Jacobs’ definitive edition of Book 12 was published – at which time it ran into the brick wall of the conservative backlash and sank, a notorious dirty book.  Book 12 was not translated into English until the 1916 Loeb, and there it lies, known to even fewer people now than in the 1800s. Simone de Beauvoir asked, Must we burn Sade?  I ask you, should we read Strato?

Short Bio:

Amy Richlin is Distinguished Research Professor of Classics at UCLA.  Her last book, Slave Theater in the Roman Republic, won the Goodwin Award from the SCS in 2018. She is currently completing a long-term project on the love letters of the young Marcus Aurelius and his teacher Cornelius Fronto. 

This talk will not be recorded and will not be available on Zoom.