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Pragmatic-Expressivist Semantics In Ovid's Poetics, Jaryth Webber

Puget Sound Undergraduate Philosophy Conference

The Augustan poets had at their disposal a vast storehouse of philosophical vocabulary, consimilar to their cache of both mythological and historical vocabularies. Vergil, for instance, had incorporated much of both the prevailing Epicureanism and the impending Stoicism of his age; the notion of philosophical appropriation in poetry as a defense against amphigory is superabundant in the aesthetics of Horace’s Ars Poetica:

Humano capiti ceruicem pictor equinam

iungere si uelit et uarias inducere plumas

undique collatis membris, ut turpiter atrum

desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne,

spectatum admissi, risum teneatis, amici? [i]

It would not be a maggoty, vagarious …