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Simulator Simius

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Graham Anderson
Graham Anderson
Affiliation:
The University of Kent
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Extract

Claudian compares Eutropius in his consular robes to a monkey, dressed in silk to amuse dinner guests, but with his buttocks bare (Eutr. 1.300–8). The situation has not failed to attract the notice of scholars. Christiansen and Fargues called attention to the striking and original use of the monkey-simile (though the latter notes that the monkey itself is a banal subject for similes, and compares Juvenal 10.194). Alan Cameron has suggested that the present example is drawn from life: ‘Who can doubt that this was a typical dinner divertissement in the elegant circles of Claudian's day-or at least one Claudian himself had witnessed?’ He cites E. R. Curtius's assertion that metaphorical apes are uncommon in ancient literature (as opposed to medieval); that may be relatively true, but when Demosthenes is entitled to address his opponent as similar licence in subsequent invective is unlimited.

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , May 1980 , pp. 259 - 260
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1980

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References

1 The Use of Images by Claudius Claudianus (The Hague, 1969), p. 93.Google Scholar

2 Commentary on in Eutropium (Paris 1933),Google Scholar ad 303 (cf. id., Claudien, études sur sa poésie (Paris, 1933), p. 323).Google Scholar

3 Claudian, , Poetry and Propaganda at the Court of Honorius (Oxford, 1970) p. 300Google Scholar

4 Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern, 1948), pp. 522 f.Google Scholar

5 Or. 18.242.

6 Crusius, O., RhM 49 (1894), 299–308Google Scholar (with numerous tentative connections with PME proverbial material). Also Bompaire, J., Spttfien scrivain (Paris, 1958), p. 461 and n. 6.Google Scholar

7 For the innuendos, Cameron, op. cit., pp. 127 ff.

8 Fr. 187 West. For a useful collection of references see West, , Iambi et Blegi Graeci i (Oxford, 1971), 71 f.;Google Scholar also S. Luria, Ph. N. F. 39 (1929), 1–21 (the latter with scarcely convincing reconstruction of the Archilochian material).

9 Progymnasmata, ed. Rabe, H. (Teubner, 1913), pp. 2 f.; for the fable in sophistic education, see Bompaire, op. cit., pp. 450–2.Google Scholar