Sensorial Intermedialities in Roman Letters: Cicero, Horace, and Ovid
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Jonathan E. Mannering
Jonathan Mannering 
Abstract
In recent years, much progress has been made towards elucidating the function of ekphrasis in Roman epistolography, especially with relation to the writings of Seneca and Pliny. Following on from these precedents, this article mines the epistles of three prominent Roman letter-writers, Cicero, Horace, and Ovid, for their intermedial elements. The motifs of oral quotations, handwriting, and human tear stains, which interweave the sources analysed, are shown not only to straddle the borders between distinct media, but also to engage with multiple senses as a result of their multiple medialities. Oral quotations integrate speech into written texts and thus necessitate both sight and hearing. Handwriting likewise consists of both a ‘basic mediality’ – the visual – and a ‘qualified mediality’ of chirographic distinctiveness, and thus necessitates not only perception via sight but also recognition. Tear stains, which range from the actual smudges in Cicero’s missives to metaphorical ones in Tears don’t feature in Horace’s letters. Ovid’s epistles, are in turn geared both towards sight and touch, since they simultaneously alter the letter’s appearance and surface. However, these intermedial connections have different effects in prose and poetry epistles: they enable the former to transcend the very category of ‘letter’, but confine the latter within the epistolary genre by characterising them in material terms.
About the author
Jonathan Mannering holds degrees in Classics from the University of Chicago and Cambridge. His interests are in Roman oratory, rhetorical theory and performance, and he has published on topics such as Roman declamation and intermediality in Roman letters. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classical Studies at Loyola University Chicago.
Acknowledgements
My thanks go to the conference organizers and attendees for their generous comments and helpful observations, to the editors for their care and patience, and to John Henderson and the anonymous reviewers for their attention and thoughtfulness. All translations are mine.
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Introduction
- Sensorial Intermedialities in Roman Letters: Cicero, Horace, and Ovid
- Quotations in Roman Prose as Intermedial Phenomena
- Monumental Absences in Ancient Historiography
- Inscriptional Intermediality in Livy
- Intermediality in the Metamorphoses
- The Touch and Taste of War in Latin Battle Narrative
- Stories from the Frontier: Bridging Past and Present at Hadrian’s Wall
- Bibliography
- Index Locorum
- Index Rerum
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Introduction
- Sensorial Intermedialities in Roman Letters: Cicero, Horace, and Ovid
- Quotations in Roman Prose as Intermedial Phenomena
- Monumental Absences in Ancient Historiography
- Inscriptional Intermediality in Livy
- Intermediality in the Metamorphoses
- The Touch and Taste of War in Latin Battle Narrative
- Stories from the Frontier: Bridging Past and Present at Hadrian’s Wall
- Bibliography
- Index Locorum
- Index Rerum
