thekleosof the artist, such as this one, which is addressed to a bull instead
of a passerby (9.734):
O bull, in vain you mount the heifer, for it is without breath.
The cow sculptor, Myron, has deceived you.Furthermore, by naming Myron as the sculptor of the cow, the text is
set after the fame of the heifer has traveled the world; it is, one might say,
an apocryphal epigram. One addresses a gadfly (9.739). Another does not
even mention the name Myron (9.740), calling him simply ‘‘the artist’’
(› ôååíßôÆò).
We can therefore understand the central place of imitation in Alexan-
drian poetic culture. It is essential to the writing of books, because only it
allows a text to have a form. Writing books within this framework allows
playing with the ‘‘book-as-support.’’ If the fictive utterance (e ́nonciation)
takes the form of that which has been uttered (e ́nonce ́), the act of signi-
fication takes this fiction into ludic account.
GREEK BOOKS IN LATIN: WHAT KIND OF SOCIALIZATION?
The play between fictive utterance and writing will become permanent in
Rome, where all literary production is set in continuity with a Greek
culture of book-as-support. We cannot here make an inventory of all the
fictive utterances used by Latin authors, both oral and written, both prose
and verse. We can cite, for example, Livy’sAnnals, Caesar’sCommentar-
ies, Cicero’s dialogues, letters in various forms, both prose and verse;
to which we can add Horace’sOdes, Catullus’s epigrams, Vergil’sEclogues,
and all the poems collected and published in books whose ambiguous
status is doubled because all are subject both to a fictive utterance as
well as a real utterance: so odes of Horace sung in Roman banquets but
also imitation Greek symposium song; theEcloguesenacted as mimes on
stage during the festival of the Floralia, but also imitation poetic competi-
tions in the manner of Theocritus; epigrams of Catullus or Martial recited
at banquets, but also imitation Alexandrian epigrams. At a third level,
these texts proclaim that they are written, and what is more, in a book, and
thus in turn are intended for a reader.
THE BOOK AS GIFT
Paradoxically, if the book does not have a reality as utterance, because it is
merely a support for a written text whose reading recalls an utterance,
either fictive or real, that performed it, nevertheless the object as such in
its material reality asvolumenis very much present at Rome, associated
with the erotic imagination because of its Greek connotations.
148 Books and Texts