Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Saunders, Max

Titel

‘Balbus was Building a Wall’: An Allusion in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Elsewhere

Ist Teil von

• Notes and queries, 2021-09, Vol.68 (3), p.344-347

Ort / Verlag

Oxford: Oxford University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Oxford Journals 2020 Humanities

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Saunders discusses the allusion in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Elsewhere. In the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when Stephen Dedalus is at Clongowes School, he considers a piece of graffiti seen "behind the door of one of the closets" of "a bearded man in a Roman dress with a brick in each hand and underneath was the name of the drawing:/Balbus was building a wall". Jeri Johnson in her notes for the Oxford World's Classics edition of A Portrait glosses this as referring to "the boys' Latin lessons; here, from Cicero (106-43 BC) in his Letters to Atticus, xii. 2: (Balbus) is building (new mansions for himself): for what cares he?". It's true that the name Balbus appears in Cicero's Letters to Atticus in connection with building.