Reviews of From a Sabine Jar: Reading Horace, Odes 1.9 (University of North Carolina Press, 1991) lead me to expect a certain kind of hostile criticism that seeks to attack something that it can only describe as "theory" by shifting the grounds of discussion to something that it knows as "facts."  If I can be shown to have gotten a "fact" wrong, then the detested "theory" (whatever it is) is undone.

Here are two examples of this kind of criticism from reviews of that earlier book.  First, deficient knowledge of Latin.  E. J. Kenney alleged that I had misunderstood the Latin of one of the sentences in Hor. C. 1.9.  He was the only reviewer to whom it seemed necessary to reply in print, partly, I admit, because of his eminence but mainly because of principle.  In "Verschränkung in Horace, Odes 1.9.9-13: A Reply to E. J. Kenney," EMC/CV N.S. 17 (1998) 57-65, I described the flaws in Kenney's procedure; I explained the construction in question; and I raised the question of whose knowledge of Latin was superior in this matter.  I leave it to others to judge.  Second, deficient knowledge of facts.  Some reviewers pounced on my generalization about windows in Roman houses. I believe that, even if some houses in Rome had windows, my interpretation of the poem easily survives.  The speaker of the poem and Thaliarchus are in a country house and they are not, as they sit by a roaring blaze, gazing out of window at Soracte.

I have recently begun to wonder what "fact" will be pounced on in Intertextuality and the Reading of Roman Poetry, and I think that I have found one.  On page xviii, I wrote: "If from the Villa dei Papiri emerge rolls of Ennius, new allusions in Vergil will also emerge."  The hostile critic may here find an opening to say: he did not know that rolls (or at least one) have (or has) already appeared.  Is it not obvious that I am not talking about the pathetic pezzi identified as Ennian by Knut Kleve ("Ennius in Herculaneum,"CErc 20 [1990] 5-16) but about interpretable lines of Ennius?  (I do not underestimate the importance of Kleve's discovery for the history of the Villa, etc.)  As for my knowledge of Latin, it is, for obvious reasons, much harder for me to see where I may be accused of having gone wrong.  But, once alerted, I am ready to provide the same service as in the case of Kenney and his review of the earlier book.

Lowell Edmunds
January 10, 2001