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Broken Hospitality and Traumatic Memory in the Funerals of Vergil’s Pallas and Valerius Flaccus’ Cyzicus

  • Helen Lovatt

    Helen Lovatt is Professor of Classics at the University of Nottingham. She has published widely on ancient Greek and Roman epic and its reception. Her most recent book is a cultural history of the Argonaut myth (In Search of the Argonauts, Bloomsbury, 2021). Her previous major monographs are: The Epic Gaze: Vision, Gender and Narrative in Ancient Epic (Cambridge, 2013) and Statius and Epic Games: Sport, Politics and Poetics in the Thebaid (Cambridge, 2005). Her current major research project is The Power of Sadness in Virgil’s Aeneid, which focuses on grief experiences and behaviors, and their interactions with power structures.
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Memory, Ritual, and Identity in Ancient Greece and Rome
This chapter is in the book Memory, Ritual, and Identity in Ancient Greece and Rome

Abstract

This paper analyzes broken hospitality as traumatizing, through Valerius Flaccus’ Cyzicus and Vergil’s Pallas. How does memory of hospitality determine grief responses, and how do rituals amplify or assuage them? The layered inter- and intra-textual memories in the Pallas and Cyzicus episodes demonstrate the importance of broken hospitality and the process of becoming immemor, a key aim of Mopsus’ purification rituals. Valerius transforms Apollonius’ Cybele ritual, with its wooden statue of Cybele, into a displacement or binding of the Doliones’ ghosts onto wooden images. Intertextual memory becomes a vector of pollution, multiplying traumatic guilt, which permeates the text both backwards and forwards in time. Hospitality as metapoetic metaphor reveals the complexity of Valerian re-readings of the Aeneid. Hospitality forms networks of allies, while broken hospitality forms networks of vengeful ghosts, which travel through texts in echoes of words, images and ritual performances.

Abstract

This paper analyzes broken hospitality as traumatizing, through Valerius Flaccus’ Cyzicus and Vergil’s Pallas. How does memory of hospitality determine grief responses, and how do rituals amplify or assuage them? The layered inter- and intra-textual memories in the Pallas and Cyzicus episodes demonstrate the importance of broken hospitality and the process of becoming immemor, a key aim of Mopsus’ purification rituals. Valerius transforms Apollonius’ Cybele ritual, with its wooden statue of Cybele, into a displacement or binding of the Doliones’ ghosts onto wooden images. Intertextual memory becomes a vector of pollution, multiplying traumatic guilt, which permeates the text both backwards and forwards in time. Hospitality as metapoetic metaphor reveals the complexity of Valerian re-readings of the Aeneid. Hospitality forms networks of allies, while broken hospitality forms networks of vengeful ghosts, which travel through texts in echoes of words, images and ritual performances.

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter I
  2. Acknowledgments
  3. Contents VII
  4. Abbreviations
  5. List of Figures XIII
  6. Introduction 1
  7. Part I Ritual, Poetics, and the Past: Greece
  8. Into the Woods: Reading the Iliad with Boeotian Cult 17
  9. Epinician Rituals in Pindar’s Fourth and Fifth Olympians: Shaping and Preserving Identities in Song 35
  10. Repeat, Remember: Ritual and Literature (Horace; Sappho, Alcaeus; Homer, Sophocles, Epicurus, Callimachus, Vergil) 47
  11. Ritual, Meter, and Cultural Memories of Megatheism: A New Case for Sarapis as the God of Hyssaldomos’ Verse-Inscription from Mylasa 71
  12. Part II Ritual, Poetics, and the Past: Rome
  13. Georgics 4: Vergil on the Rites of Poetry and Philosophy at the Dawn of a New Era 97
  14. Horace’s Ritual Song in Augustan Rome: The Sacred Poet as an alter princeps 119
  15. Divining Identity in Seneca’s Oedipus 139
  16. Part III Performing Identity
  17. Call the Witnesses: Athenian Citizenship Practice at the Crossroads of Memory, Ritual, and Identity 153
  18. Embodied Memory in the Panathenaia 169
  19. Ritual Against Memory: Managing the Ancestors in Ancient Rome 195
  20. Part IV Trauma and Memory
  21. Aeneas’ tropaeum: Collective Trauma and Commemoration in Vergil’s Aeneid 213
  22. Broken Hospitality and Traumatic Memory in the Funerals of Vergil’s Pallas and Valerius Flaccus’ Cyzicus 237
  23. Memory, Ritual, and Identity in Prudentius, Peristephanon and Paulinus of Nola, Natalicia 271
  24. Part V Women, Ritual and Memory
  25. Remembering Female Names: Crisis, Ritual, and Collective Identity Formation in Ancient Greek Epic Poetry 289
  26. Ritual Lament, Memory, and Identity in Euripides’ Trojan Trilogy 307
  27. Memory, Ritual, and the Politics of Closure in Tacitus, Ann. 3.76 323
  28. Part VI Places
  29. Treasuries, Identity, and Politics 337
  30. Ancient Greek Construction Rituals, Tradition, and the Articulation of Communal Identities 355
  31. Ritual, Memory, and Identity: The Case of Theoriae 385
  32. Pomponius Mela’s Hercules: Preserving Phoenician Ritual Memory and Identity 405
  33. List of Contributors 423
  34. Index Rerum
  35. Index Locorum
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111197456-013

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter I
  2. Acknowledgments
  3. Contents VII
  4. Abbreviations
  5. List of Figures XIII
  6. Introduction 1
  7. Part I Ritual, Poetics, and the Past: Greece
  8. Into the Woods: Reading the Iliad with Boeotian Cult 17
  9. Epinician Rituals in Pindar’s Fourth and Fifth Olympians: Shaping and Preserving Identities in Song 35
  10. Repeat, Remember: Ritual and Literature (Horace; Sappho, Alcaeus; Homer, Sophocles, Epicurus, Callimachus, Vergil) 47
  11. Ritual, Meter, and Cultural Memories of Megatheism: A New Case for Sarapis as the God of Hyssaldomos’ Verse-Inscription from Mylasa 71
  12. Part II Ritual, Poetics, and the Past: Rome
  13. Georgics 4: Vergil on the Rites of Poetry and Philosophy at the Dawn of a New Era 97
  14. Horace’s Ritual Song in Augustan Rome: The Sacred Poet as an alter princeps 119
  15. Divining Identity in Seneca’s Oedipus 139
  16. Part III Performing Identity
  17. Call the Witnesses: Athenian Citizenship Practice at the Crossroads of Memory, Ritual, and Identity 153
  18. Embodied Memory in the Panathenaia 169
  19. Ritual Against Memory: Managing the Ancestors in Ancient Rome 195
  20. Part IV Trauma and Memory
  21. Aeneas’ tropaeum: Collective Trauma and Commemoration in Vergil’s Aeneid 213
  22. Broken Hospitality and Traumatic Memory in the Funerals of Vergil’s Pallas and Valerius Flaccus’ Cyzicus 237
  23. Memory, Ritual, and Identity in Prudentius, Peristephanon and Paulinus of Nola, Natalicia 271
  24. Part V Women, Ritual and Memory
  25. Remembering Female Names: Crisis, Ritual, and Collective Identity Formation in Ancient Greek Epic Poetry 289
  26. Ritual Lament, Memory, and Identity in Euripides’ Trojan Trilogy 307
  27. Memory, Ritual, and the Politics of Closure in Tacitus, Ann. 3.76 323
  28. Part VI Places
  29. Treasuries, Identity, and Politics 337
  30. Ancient Greek Construction Rituals, Tradition, and the Articulation of Communal Identities 355
  31. Ritual, Memory, and Identity: The Case of Theoriae 385
  32. Pomponius Mela’s Hercules: Preserving Phoenician Ritual Memory and Identity 405
  33. List of Contributors 423
  34. Index Rerum
  35. Index Locorum
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