Laudator Temporis Acti

Peter Green, "Juvenal Revisited," Grand Street 9.1 (Autumn, 1989) 175-196 (at 181-182, with a typographical error fixed):

In those innocent days no one had as yet come forward to inform us, with peremptory assurance, that authorial intention was irrelevant, that the work was, literally, in the eye of the beholder, that critical reader-response and Rezeptionsgeschichte were what mattered, that judging the literary value of a poem or play in any abiding sense was a self-deluding mirage, that a menu or a seed catalogue could be deconstructed in just the same way as the Iliad, that the true creative artist was the translator, and that in any case the apparent "character" of author or narrator must always be viewed as a mere literary mask, a persona, an artificial manipulation of traditional formalized topoi, rhetorical clichés. Juvenal, as readers of Professor W.S. Anderson will know, has been no more immune than the next man to this kind of treatment. Though obviously useful to the extent of correcting excessive faith in what has been termed the "biographical fallacy," this entire movement (I have to make clear from the start) strikes me as not only misconceived but positively dangerous, destruction rather than deconstruction, moral and aesthetic nihilism winding up in a literary cul-de-sac, fueled by professional academic theorists with fond memories of the 1960s and a conscious or unconscious hatred of all creative art: intellectuals to whom the notions of absolute objective truth or sustainable moral value judgments are, for a variety of ideological reasons, pure anathema. When I ask myself whether creator or interpreter is more important in the ultimate scheme of things (and never mind the attempt to gussy up the status of interpretation by giving it the pseudo-Hellenistic label of "hermeneutics"), then I only have to ask myself which of the two could more easily survive without the other. Mistletoe needs oak; cuckoo must find nest; the parasite cannot exist apart from its involuntary host.

Id. (at 182-183):

If literature is no part of the historical process but a mere intellectual game of which the rules can be refashioned by any player, wherein does its value lie, except as a suspect vehicle for academic careerism? And how can it be related to the beliefs and cultural evolution of the society that generated it, let alone to the individual whose vision drew it into being? Just how far this dissociative principle can go was lately demonstrated by a not overimaginative English classicist, who proved, to his own satisfaction, if not to that of any historian, by argumenta ex silentio and a list of putative geographical and climatic errors, that Ovid was in fact never exiled to Tomis at all, but simply sat in Rome for the last decade of his life playing with the rhetoric of exilic themes.

I thus have two serious strikes against me: I am a historian, which means that I believe in the objective existence of truth, and have no great faith in the binding force of critical theory; and not only do I passionately love literature, but I never forget that it was written by real people, in an actual society, at a specific point in time. My position in academe thus somewhat recalls that of Juvenal's friend Umbricius (another character whose very existence has been doubted: Umbricius, umbra, the shadow-man), who asked: "What can I do in Rome? I never learnt how/ to lie. If a book is bad, I cannot puff it .../ astrological clap-trap/ is not in my stars." All signification is not relative, is not arbitrary. I do not regard it as the chief function of my profession to play literary games that generate their own rules. The retrojection of such modern theories, with a fine disregard for changing historical circumstance, on to ancient authors is something I have always found irritatingly perverse.

The English classicist who argued that Ovid was never exiled is A.D. Fitton-Brown, "The Unreality of Ovid's Tomitan Exile," Liverpool Classical Monthly 10 (1985) 19-22, now followed by Michael Fontaine, "The Myth of Ovid's Exile," Electryone 6.1 (2018) 1-14.