63 Colloquial and Li.. - Ganino.com

294 kathleen m. coleman
of both prose and verse. 5 The historians use it in a variety of ways. Some
of these can be illustrated from Annals 3, on which a pair of recent commentators
have contributed illuminating remarks (Woodman and Martin
1996): Tacitus frequently uses parenthesis for subjective authorial comment
to separate two narratives (Ann. 3.16.1), or to introduce background
material (Ann. 3.56.2) or additional evidence (Ann. 3.66.2–4) oramore
loosely related digression (Ann. 3.24.1). The effect is that the authorial
voice becomes more audible, since the parenthetic mode draws attention
to the intervention by the architect of the discourse. The explanatory
parenthesis that supplies background detail, common in oratory (Roschatt
1884: 238), can be employed to illustrate the omniscience of the narrator;
this is closely related to the way in which Callimachus, in the Hymns
and Aetia, uses parentheses as a vehicle for a display of arcane knowledge
– what one might term the ‘learned footnote’ style. This mannerism,
taken over by Virgil and Ovid, is also in evidence in the Silvae, and
must therefore be distinguished from more obviously colloquial parentheses,
which tend to be shorter and more ‘chatty’; such parentheses are also
employed by Callimachus, but in the Iambi and the Epigrams (Tarrant 1998:
143).
Statius remarks of two of the poems in the Silvae – on the oddly shaped
tree on Atedius Melior’s estate on the Caelian Hill (2.3), and on the demise
of Melior’s parrot (2.4) – that they were composed quasi epigrammatis
loco, and he goes on to include in the same category the subsequent poem
(2.5), on the death of Domitian’s favourite lion (2 praef. 14–18). But the
stylistic register of the Silvae is far different from that of epigram, being
characterised by elaborate hyperbaton, extensive mythological embroidery
and bold paradox. Both the terms ‘mannered’ and ‘baroque’ have been
applied to it. Splashes of colour from the colloquial register are all the
more striking against this background, lending a flash of intimacy to the
client-poet’s habitually deferential stance – a stance that is, in any case,
adapted according to metre and genre, so that the jocular hendecasyllables
to Plotius Grypus (which demonstrate other colloquial features too), 6 or
5 General treatments of parenthesis in Greek and Latin: Boldt 1884: 159–79,Schwyzer1939, Marouzeau
1954: 242–5; in colloquial Latin: Hofmann 1951 (cf. Hofmann–Ricottilli, with Ricottilli’s addition at
378 n. 1 on §106); in Cicero’s letters: Bolkestein 1998; in the orators: Grünewald 1912,Roschatt1884;
in the historians: Schmitt 1913, Comber 1976; in Callimachus: Lapp 1965: 52–3; in Catullus, Virgil,
and other Augustan poets: G. Williams 1968: 711–72, Tarrant 1998; in Ovid: Albrecht 1964, Kenney
1970.
6 E.g. 4.9.9 (Statius’ gift of his libellus) praeter me mihi constitit decussis, ‘cost me (apart from my
personal contribution) ten asses’: ‘the elliptical use of the pronoun instead of noun and possessive
adjective sounds colloquial’ (K. Coleman 1988: 226).