The King Listens: Origins, Noises, and Panegyric in Sidonius Apollinaris' Carmen 1

Abstract:In the opening piece of his poetic corpus (Carm. 1), the 5th century Gallo-Roman poet Sidonius Apollinaris presents the reader with an archetypical situation: after Jupiter has been established as king of the universe by Natura, various gods and demi-gods offer various kinds of praise to their new master. The peculiarity of these expressions of praise, however, is that they do not consist of words but of sounds produced by musical instruments, as well as by applause, feet, and, in the very middle of the poem, even a hinnitus. I argue that this poem emphasizes "origins" at different levels: it is the first poem in the entire collection, and it works as a praefatio to the following poem, a panegyric to the emperor Anthemius, but I will also argue that this poem invokes nothing less than the original violent process of giving significance to sounds. But Jupiter's "semantic" abuse acquires a subversive value when considered in its own textual environment; this poem suggests in an exemplary way the violent and repressive substance of imperial panegyric.