On Plagiarism
Claudia Cockerell February 20, 2024
In Ancient Rome, copying was an art form. Poets were always stealing each others’ ideas and repackaging them in playful and compelling ways. All of the great Roman authors lifted material from Homer on countless occasions – from exact translations of lines, as we see in Virgil’s Aeneid, to Ovid’s irreverent upcycling of the entire Iliad in Book 12 of his Metamorphoses. The famously mischievous poet takes the most obscure characters from the Iliad and brings them centre stage, making Achilles seem like a bit-part extra.
Every poet’s material was fair game, and the ideas they bounced off of each other produced complex, multi layered work. The Roman love poet Catullus translated an entire poem of Sappho’s (now referred to as Sappho 31), only slightly reworking it to make it an address to his lover, the fittingly pseudonymed Lesbia. “That man seems to me to be equal to the gods,” both poets begin, in Latin and Ancient Greek. The man has become godlike because he’s speaking to Catullus and Sappho’s female lovers, and hearing her twinkly laugh. But Catullus turns what is originally celebratory into a breakup poem. He describes himself as miserable, with far too much time on his hands, implying Lesbia has moved on with this man. Perhaps he sits with her at dinner, while Catullus looks on in mournful longing.
Copycat material took all sorts of forms. We might think that feminist retellings of old stories are of the zeitgeist, but the Ancients beat us to the punch. Take Ovid’s Heroides, a series of letters written from the perspective of canonical heroines like Dido, Helen, Penelope, and Ariadne, to their lovers and admirers. They are far cries from the submissive women we see in Homer. Ariadne pens a diatribe against Theseus for abandoning her on a deserted island after she helped him kill the minotaur, while Helen tells Paris to stop soliciting her for sex.
The Iliad had more reworkings and retellings than any other ancient poem. The Roman love poets turned it into elegy, while the epic poets refashioned it to tell the story of Aeneas. What is left behind is a complex network of texts, which exert dynamic influence on each other. When we re-read Theseus’ heroic deeds, we can’t help hearing Ariadne’s cries of “Traitor! Traitor!” from the shores of Naxos.
Nowadays, this kind of literary imitation might be seen as plagiarism. There are many rewrites of classic texts, but borrowing material line by line from a contemporary work is relatively unheard of. The Homeric texts served as a code model from which so much material sprouted. Shakespeare is the closest thing we have today, but there is nothing comparable to the Iliad’s influence. It is an origin story, a bible of sorts that paved the way for the literary canon.
The Ancients’ obsession with competitive imitation is being echoed, of all places, on TikTok. A video, sound, or dance routine will go viral, and a thousand people will copy and repost their own version. It is strangely compelling to watch these countless iterations; spotting the little tweaks each person makes, as they leave their own mark on the original. There’s good reason we feel averse to copying nowadays. What can be more tiresome than slavish imitation or a trite rehashing of an idea that’s been flogged to death. But providing a new lens through which to see an old story can be transformative.
Claudia Cockerell
